When Scotland decided to release the terrorist Abdel Basset al-Megrahi, who was convicted in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am 103, critics latched on to the reactions of victims' families as a reason to cry foul. Scotland's First Minister continues to defend the decision to release, in part because other victim-families say it's time to forgive and forget. Both sides seem to ignore a basic principle: the views of the victims and their families are totally irrelevant. While media rush to report them, actually the opinions of distraught and very biased families, even at a remove of 20 years, cannot be the basis of decisions in any part of the criminal process - not in investigation, prosecution, conviction, sentencing... or release.
To understand why not, we only need to look at other cases, such as the recent "Norfolk Four," in which the victim's relatives, confronted with solid evidence that the parties convicted of a rape/murder years ago were actually innocent, nevertheless voiced their preference for keeping the erroneously convicted men locked up.
Did politics and other factors play a part in Scotland? Probably (just as they would here in such a high-profile case). One theory that I've heard holds that the Scots, who take pride in a reputation for frugality, probably took into account the high cost of keeping and treating al-Megrahi. Will letting this terrorist go "encourage" other terrorists, as some in our government have argued? That seems dubious; an individual willing to meet certain death by becoming a human bomb isn't likely to be deterred by considerations of prison time.
No, Scotland's legal system, we are told, permits the release of convicts who are terminally ill. As a rule, one shouldn't suppose that a legal system unprepared to execute the perpetrator of such a crime would balk at releasing him. If the Scots decided al-Megrahi met the conditions for compassionate release, Lockerbie victims and others will just need to live with it. Things might be different (ARE different) in other countries, but Scotland isn't Iran or North Korea.
Of course the corollary of international respect for countries' varying legal systems is that it has to be reciprocal. That means that countries that have adopted anti-death-penalty positions ought not hesitate to extradite accused criminals to the U.S. just because we do have a death penalty.
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