-9 months to liveFollow

And the knowledge was wrong. Hence my point. The compassionate release was based on an assumption which was false. I guess my point is that if you're going to release someone convicted of mass murder because he's got three months to live, perhaps you should really really really make sure he's only got three months to live. If there's even a tiny possibility that you might be wrong, you shouldn't do it.


Like I said. Lesson learned.

No, it wasn't; doctors assessments are usually approximately correct, but unlikely things (such as them not being correct) can still happen. The possibility of the doctor being wrong was acknowledged but considered unlikely; just because he was wrong does not make that assessment incorrect.

It's become clear that you can't deal with a shift from generality to specificity. Decisions are made on a probabilistic analysis of facts but the outcome is always definite. My assessment that a balanced coin is unlikely to come up heads three times is not invalidated just because the coin does just that.



The justice secretary disagrees. If you want to place fault on him, you have to show there was reason to suspect the doctor's assessment was significantly less reliable than usual (than doctor's assessments usually are).

Lol. And since it's an oil company, it's automatically associated with conservatives? Go do some research on BP and Obama's campaign sometime. Get back to me when you learn that the world isn't quite as black and white as you've been taught.

Yes. And they usually suffer lawsuits when that happens, don't they? And this isn't a little bit off. This was a high profile case, and they didn't just get it a little bit wrong, they were utterly and completely wrong. You don't say someone has three months to live unless you've exhausted all possible treatments which might allow him to live longer. And while you might be off by a few weeks or even a month or two, you can't possibly be off that much without having completely missed an entire potential course of treatment.

Medicine isn't an exact science, but it's not that inexact either.



Be clear what you mean by "wrong". There's "wrong" as in "we missed a treatment which he'll respond to and recover", and "wrong" as in, we were off by a couple weeks as to how long he had to live. What was acknowledged was that they might be off by a small amount of time. The key point is what I already quoted. That release on compassionate grounds requires that the persons expected lifetime be "short". Thus, the Secretary assumed that he had very little time left, not that he might have very little time left.



Of course it does. Why would you think otherwise? He was released out of compassion for something that didn't end out happening.



Quite the opposite. The problem is that the general was used to make a ruling on a specific case. Those involved in that decision should have been much more aware of that fact than they were.



Actually, statistically it's quite likely to come up three times in a row, not the other way around. One of the tricks statistics teachers like to play to illustrate this is to have one person flip a coin 50 times and record the order of heads and tails, and the rest of the class simply writes down 50 heads or tails results as though it was a random sequence. The teacher can always identify the one that was actually generated randomly because it'll be the one in the stack which has 5 or 6 heads in a row. Random doesn't mean equally distributed.

That aside, the point is that if there's a chance the coin could come up heads three times in a row, you *don't* do something which assumes that it wont.



You don't know that. You're assuming that he realized that there was a chance that the prisoner might respond well to treatment and still be alive a year later. I doubt highly that this was the case. I'm pretty sure that the only doubt in his mind was exactly how long he had to live, and that time frame was measured in months, not years.





My point is that fault has to lie *somewhere*. Yet it seems like some of you are going to great lengths to insist that no one is at all to blame for this fiasco. Why?

Edited, Aug 24th 2010 5:42pm by gbaji

Right, cancer never goes into spontaneous remission, and doctors get sued for underestimating the time people have left to live...

Oh, do please show me where I made any assumptions about conservatives dealing with oil companies. You reading comprehension is at it's usual level.

I'm naming Mr. Gbaji, since he feels that someone should be blamed for not being able to see that instead of 3 months to live, someone might beat the odds and live another 10 years.

None of us can be certain about how long anyone will live. Doctors are just better able to give a educated guess and patients have been known to beat incredible odds of dying sometimes.

So the guy could drop dead tomorrow. Would that make the judge's decision right then?

The compassionate release, under Scottish law, was justified. The only thing that counts there is the medical opinion of the doctors who examined him. Please note that while in Greenock prison, he had started to refuse the medical treatment offered for his condition. This may well have affected the length of time he was forecast to live after release. Recent reports from Libya say that he resumed treatment for his cancer after returning there, thus prolonging his life.

The huge elephant in the room which few are talking about now is the fact that a lot of new evidence has come to light to question whether his conviction was justified. At the time of his compassionate release, he had an appeal pending in the Scottish courts against his conviction. One of the conditions of his release was that he dropped this appeal. (Petition to discontinue his appeal accepted at Edinburgh High Court - Aug 18 2009; Justice Secretary confirms Megrahi's release on compassionate grounds - Aug 20 2009) So - while he may die a guilty man under the law, the lack of any appeal will mean that the evidence which may show that he was not the guilty party will never be put to the test. Thus allowing the US to go on trying to interfere in another sovereign country's legal system by their demands that elected officials of that country justify themselves to people to which they are not accountable.

Oh - and tell Donald Trump to take his golf course somewhere else too.... :)

Edited as I realised I had finished the final sentence on a preposition - naughty!

Edited, Aug 25th 2010 6:00pm by Kelanthor

Um... The problem is that the Scottish government was unable to see that someone might beat the odds and live another 10 years.



Then we shouldn't release them from a life sentence because they only have three months to live.



Then don't assume that someone has only three months to live and release him from a life sentence. Let him live out his sentence. If that takes 3 months, or 10 years, that's the sentence he was given, right?



No. That's the point. If it's possible for the prognosis to be wrong, you don't release him. Clearly, it was possible for it to be wrong. And the evidence we're learning about as this unfolds makes this even more clear that someone was playing fast and loose with said prognosis.

Apparently, it was based on the fact that he had refused treatment. Thus, the prognosis was specific to how long he'd live if he remained in prison and continued to refuse treatment. Surely, common sense should dictate that under those circumstances, you don't grant a compassionate release. Otherwise, every prisoner could just go on a hunger strike and refuse to eat. Doctors would then state that he only has a month to live, and he'd get released, resume eating and has now beaten the rap!


We should assume that doctors aren't quite that dumb, so someone somewhere had to know that this was bogus.

I'll say it again cause you can't get your facts straight. He was never given a life sentence. He was sentenced to 27 years.

Because we are quite arrogant and assume that everyone wants our input when they don't.

Yep, double standard. One standard for an illegal invasion of a sovereign country which lead to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and another standard for releasing some dude who has cancer leading to the loss of 0 lives.

Crazy, I know.

Way to miss the point. If that's the standard, then have the balls to say that. Say you oppose war, period. Say you support giving compassionate release to convicted terrorists, period. Don't play games by pretending that somehow the inclusion of money/oil into the equation matters one bit.

The point I'm making is that it was never about the oil. Because if you really cared about whether someone was making oil profits off some shady back room deal, you'd care in every case. But you don't, do you?



People who have to lie about their positions in order to gain support for them? Yeah. I think so. You'd think that a sane person might just re-assess their position first. I also always wonder how someone doing that feels when they "win". See. Cause if I oppose something and I convince other people that the thing I oppose is bad, so they stop doing it, that's a real win. But if I oppose something, but instead of convincing people that it's bad, I instead convince them that we shouldn't do it for some completely unrelated reason, what have I done? Nothing. I've just convinced people that the unrelated reason is important, but not the thing I really care about.


It would be like banning segregation, not because racial discrimination is a violation of rights, but because it just costs too much to maintain twice as many drinking fountains. Not much of a victory...