Lockerbie Bomber is free...

Originally Posted by Locke

Why are the scots being "compassionate" toward him... he sure as fuck wasn't towards them.

"Compassion" doesn't mean "an eye for an eye", chuckles. Some of us like to set our ethical baseline a little higher than that of a murderer.

"Somebody should murder that murderer" is the least rational idea in history, but it certainly crops up often enough.

How ya doing, buddy?

Whether he is or is not personally a good person (and I'm not saying he is) it does not mitigate the responsibility of the rest of us to be good people. That was my point about "an eye for an eye". The function of criminal justice isn't revenge or vindictiveness: it's public safety and rehabilitation. Keeping a dying man locked in a cell when he can't possibly pose any more threat to anyone is, yes, petty and vengeful.

What use is a life sentence on a man that God himself has put on death row?

There's nowhere I can't reach.

Originally Posted by Zergrinch

Locke's opinion isn't in the minority, fellas. You are.

LEGAL PRECEDENT DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

You can't punish or reform this man, because he's going to die, very likely before the year is out. There is literally no value to holding him except as a propaganda tool to assuage the vengeful spirits of —

well.

And, please: he's not going to make a miraculous recovery. He has prostate cancer. In LIBYA.

I am a dolphin, do you want me on your body?

You said it yourself, Locke.

We have to pay to send him back to Libya, because if we just opened the prison gates and let him wander around Glasgow you'll just be giving the police another murder to solve within the week.

And, let's face it— we think of prison as an awful place to be, but I have to imagine that the prisons in a country that would let you free out of compassion has to be a nicer place to stay than nearly anywhere in Libya. There's really no logic to assuming that he'll be better off in any concrete way.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Well, yes, but his "hero status" such as it is appears to be based on the notion that he's a scapegoat rather than any open declaration that killing Americans is totally rad.

So he's just their Mumia, really.

And, of course, like Mumia, he's probably guilty as sin, buuuuut you can kind of see their point. If you squint.

But yes. Even if we assume this is a move purely done as a propaganda move to improve British-Libyan relations, that's fine. The upside of making an entire nation slightly less irritated with you well outweighs the pouty indignation of people STILL CRYING over the dead of two decades ago.

No amount of imprisoning a dying man will bring their sons and daughters back, and if there's even a slim chance that freeing him will reduce the chance of future bombings, holy shit, jump on that goddamn train immediately.

How ya doing, buddy?

Letting a man free does not make him "more of a martyr"

What has been done defuses his status as a martyr.

You are using the word in a manner precisely opposite to that of its actual meaning.

He will be a "hero" until he dies, at which point he will be forgotten since nothing terribly awful really happened to him. His candidacy for martyrdom has been revoked.

The whole point of martyrdom is to die painfully at the hands of your enemies so the survivors have something to get good and mad about.

FELIPE NO

It's not the lack of precedent for his position that bothers me as much as the notion that prisoners should receive treatment dependent entirely on the opinion of the families of victims.

"Mrs. Harris, new DNA tests have shown that Gerry Woods could not have possibly killed your daughter, therefore we're freeing him."

"Well, that's bullshit and it makes me mad!"

"Oh, well, in that case. Lock him back up, boys!"

What, you don't want my bikini-clad body?

We're never gonna hear from Locke again, he discovered that one of the passengers on today's flight was a convict who got out early on good behavior so he slammed the plane into a mountain for JUSTICE

Getting to ride on an airplane? Pretty good reward for robbing a Dollar Tree, scum. NOT ON MY WATCH

Jam it back in, in the dark.

I don't disagree with his stance as a general principle. All things being equal I agree that felons should mostly serve their sentences in full, whatever they may be.

What's being mocked here is the absurd, bombastic way in which he's presented his position: the blubbery insistence that we THINK OF THE FAMILIES COULD YOU EXPLAIN THIS TO THE FAMILIES, the appeals to capital-J JUSTICE, the notion that eye-for-an-eye is a sensible way to run things.

I find no fault with Locke's conclusions; I find fault with his methodology and the mad conclusions it may later lead him to.

There's nowhere I can't reach.