Legal News

On the Lockerbie Defendant and ?Compassionate Release?

By Ashby Jones

It’s an interesting question: Whether and when a prisoner’s sentence be commuted once it’s determined that a prisoner will soon die?

The issue leaped into the public spotlight on Thursday when Scotland agreed to release Abdel Basset Ali al-Megrahi, a former Libyan intelligence agent who was convicted of murdering 259 people in the terrorist attack of Pan Am Flight 103. The airline exploded over Lockerbie, Scotland in December of 1988. Of those killed, 179 were Americans.

Megrahi was convicted in 2001 in a special court established in the Netherlands, and sentenced to serve at least 27 years. However, he’s been freed after serving only eight, largely because he’s been diagnosed with terminal prostate cancer. Doctors say Megrahi likely only has several months to live. He left Scotland Thursday on a flight bound back to Libya. Click here for the WSJ story; here for the NYT article; here for the story from the Glasgow Evening-Times.

The decision was made by Scotland’s Justice minister, Kenny MacAskill. MacAskill acknowledged that Megrahi "did not show his victims any comfort or compassion" and that they were not allowed to go home to their families. "No compassion was shown by him to them," he said. "But that alone is not a reason for us to deny compassion to him."

Over at the Sentencing Law & Policy Blog, Douglas Berman talks briefly about our own “compassion” statute, 18 USC § 3582(c). He says that application of the compassion statute has been “notoriously stingy,” adding that, in his opinion, “reactions of the White House and the Secretary of State to Scotland’s decision in this high-profile case spotlights that the concept of compassionate release is still not seriously embraced in the United States.”

As Berman notes, a few years ago, the United States Sentencing Commission approved a new policy statement to guide judges considering whether to reduce a federal prisoner’s term of imprisonment for "extraordinary and compelling reasons," which specifically includes when a defendant is suffering from a terminal illness. Click here for the ABA’s writeup on that, courtesy of Berman.

LBers, any thoughts? Let’s play the role of what we imagine will be the devil’s advocate on this: What’s wrong with allowing someone — even a convicted murderer of 259 people — to spend the last 90 days or so of his life in his home country, outside of prison?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on August 20, 2009 (boomark / email).