Saturday 27 December 2014

The facts persistently taint the purity of the Crown's belief system

[Where was the Crown’s Lockerbie fight is the heading over a letter from Thomas Crooks published in today’s edition of The Scotsman.  It reads as follows:]

During a speech in America on the 26th anniversary of the Lockerbie bombing, Scotland’s Lord Advocate opined: “During the 26 year-long inquiry not one Crown Office investigator or prosecutor has raised a concern about the evidence in the case.”

So there we have it! No ifs, no buts, no doubts about the “merits” of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi’s conviction.

The unanimous opinions of Crown Office lawyers are more than good enough to flay the “conspiracy theorists”. Deluded by a pile of doubts about the conviction, (based on an abundance of objective evidence), critics of the verdict could have avoided all that angst if they had simply phoned the Crown Office for reassurance.

The Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), identified six serious doubts about the merits of the conviction but faced with the infallibility complex that suffuses the Crown Office, the reviewers clearly engaged in a pointless exercise.

The Lord Advocate, in his address to the memorial service, said his ongoing investigation “remains on the evidence and not on speculation and supposition”. Implicitly, the conclusions of the SCCRC are based on “speculation and supposition” – and are therefore worthless.

Clearly, the Crown Office and the Lord Advocate have an encyclopaedic capacity for never knowingly doubting the merits of their prosecutions or the convictions deriving from those prosecutions.

The facts, however, persistently taint the purity of their belief system.

Tony Gauci, the Crown’s star witness, long before he entered the witness box, was acutely aware of the Reward for Justice programme controlled by the US Department of Justice. He knew that no reward would be forthcoming if his “evidence” served the interests of justice by helping to exonerate Megrahi. The Reward for Justice Programme was arguably codespeak for “convict a Libyan, blame Gadafi for the bombing and thereby satisfy America’s geopolitical machinations”.

Gauci was psychologically primed, thanks to the prospect of a reward (he subsequently received $2 million) to give the “quality” of evidence that would secure a conviction. Those facts alone shred Gucci’s credibility, they destroy the basis of Megrahi’s conviction and therefore reflect a gross miscarriage of justice.

The Lord Advocate concluded his memorial address by assuring his audience that “the Crown will never give up the fight to secure justice for the families of those who died”.

Arguably, the Crown gave up that fight the day the state adopted Gauci as the star witness.

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