Scotland's Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill could be heard hugging himself when he let Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset Al-Megrahi go free on humanitarian grounds. He announced:

Compassion and mercy are about upholding the beliefs that we seek to live by, remaining true to our values as  a people. No matter the severity of the provocation or the atrocity perpetrated.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemned the repulsive decision. Al-Megrahi helped take  270 lives in in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Scotland in 1988.  Terminally ill with prostate cancer, al Megrahi was flown home to die among his kin.

I do not belong to the hang-em-high crowd.  I  have long opposed the death penalty, and MacAskill has just made the job of recruiting others to that view harder to do.

My argument has been this:  The state does not have to kill people it holds in custody.  Instead, it can put those who commit monstrous crimes behind bars for the rest of the their days.

Al-Megrahi was not a 19-year-old who killed someone in a bar fight over a girl. He was a mass murderer who coolly plotted the incineration of hundreds of innocents.

Mercy for al-Megrahi was not putting him alone in a room with the families of the Lockerbie victims.  Mercy was giving him a fair trial, then sentencing him to life without parole.

We who fight on the front lines against the death penalty  -- who argue that justice can be served without it -- have been delivered a setback.  MacAskill's self-loving "act of compassion" makes me sick.

www.fromaharrop.com