Over the top on Abdelbaset al-Megrahi's dossier

[This is the heading over an article by Marcel Berlins on The Guardian's Comment is free website. It reads as follows:]

Scotland's chief law officer, lord advocate Elish Angiolini, was wrong to "deplore the efforts by Abdelbaset al-Megrahi to challenge his conviction through selective publication of his view of the evidence in the media".

A 298-page dossier has been published online, aimed at contesting Megrahi's conviction for the Lockerbie bombing. With further documents to be made public soon, the online material will amount to what would have been put to the Scottish court of appeal later this year had Megrahi not been returned to Libya on compassionate grounds.

Why is the lord advocate so exercised? "The only appropriate forum for the determination of guilt or innocence is the criminal court," she says. Yes, of course – but that's never been a barrier to campaigns over purported miscarriages of justice before. Indeed, almost all the famous cases were first brought to public attention not in a courtroom but by way of a media drive.

It is true, as Angiolini points out, that Megrahi voluntarily abandoned his appeal. But he did so because he and his advisers believed that it would improve his chances of release. I do not know whether or not his actions had that effect, but it was always made clear that withdrawing the appeal was not to be taken as a lack of confidence, or an admission of guilt.

Angiolini reminds us that Megrahi was convicted unanimously by three senior Scottish judges, with the conviction unanimously upheld on appeal by five judges. She fails to add that the second appeal had been initiated by the independent Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), which had referred the case back to the court of appeal in 2007 because it had doubts about the safety of Megrahi's conviction. The SCCRC does not reach such decisions lightly, and two-thirds of the cases it has referred to the court over the past few years have resulted in successful appeals.

In particular, the second appeal claimed that judges in the original trial had made errors in the way they treated the evidence of a Maltese shopkeeper, Tony Gauci – evidence that was crucial in linking Megrahi to the bombing. Gauci claimed to have identified Megrahi as the purchaser of clothing later found in the suitcase containing the Lockerbie bomb. That identification is at the centre of the doubt raised by the SCCRC.

Angiolini says that the crown was "ready, willing and able" to fight the appeal. I'm sure that's so, and I'm sure she was confident of winning, but that doesn't explain or justify her inflated reaction to Megrahi's online dossier.

We will probably never know for sure whether Megrahi planted the bomb on Pan Am flight 103 more than 20 years ago. But it would have been more dignified and more effective had the lord advocate merely emphasised the one-sided nature of Megrahi's online campaign, rather than giving the impression that she would have preferred the opposing argument to have been banned altogether.

[Unlike Mr Berlins, I am not sure that the Lord Advocate was confident of winning the appeal. The relief in the Crown Office when Mr Megrahi abandoned it was palpable and undisguised. And the later stages of the appeal would have shone a light on prosecution failure to make available to the defence material that could have assisted them, which would have been embarrassing, to say the least, to the Crown Office.]