If we take the case of the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi, out of its context for just one minute, it becomes a simple choice of mercy over justice. He was convicted under Scottish law for his crimes and sentenced to a prison sentence he hasn’t finished yet. You could argue that the fact he has cancer should not matter in the carrying out of his sentence, that he himself didn’t afford his victims any mercy after all. But justice should tempered with mercy or it’s just revenge: keeping a man dying of cancer in prison to let him suffer as much as his victims is the latter. Whether or not the victims or the US government agrees with this, understandable as it is, does not enter into this.
It’s only when we take the context in which this decision is made into consideration that it becomes an interesting question. The decision to consider Megrahi’s request is of course a politicial decision, formally taken in Scotland but driven by London interests. The idea is to make Libya — no longer a pariah state but a valued member of the international community open to British investments and a future supplier of oil — happy by getting Megrahi freed with the least amount of embarassement.
And there was a lot of potential embarassement for London and Washington both waiting in Megrahi’s appeal against his convinction, which is why he had to drop his appeal as the price to pay for his early release. Megrahi has never accepted his conviction, always maintained his innocence and the circumstances in which he was convicted were dodgy enough that he had a good chance of seeing his conviction overturned. The idea that it had been Libya behind the bombing was always a political decision first, rather than the outcome of a careful police investigation. The evidence at the time pointed to Syria and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command (PFLP-GC) as the culprits and it was only when Syria was courted in the runup to the First Gulf War two years later that Libya was getting blamed for it instead.
A retrial then would’ve been awkward, as it might find Megrahi innocent and reveal what a lot of the Lockerbie victims already suspected, that he was stitched up and the true murderers got away scot free. Worse, it might well have found him guilty again and embarrassed Libya once more. So much better than to release him on humanitarian grounds and get him safely back to Libya where he can disappear in silence…