Scotland’s misplaced sympathy for an unforgivable criminal

Terrorism is a uniquely culpable crime. While many murders are in some sense premeditated, a terrorist attack is meticulously plotted, intricately studied, and carefully calibrated to inflect the deepest possible injury on a society. So it was with the Pan Am 103 bombing on Dec. 21, 1988.

Massachusetts residents know well the cost of that tragic event. The plane’s 258 passengers included about two dozen people from New England, many of them college students returning from a semester in England organized through Syracuse University. The grief was like a lightning bolt aimed at local towns. Empty Christmas stockings hung on living room mantles as families gathered to mourn their lost children. The images became indelible: the cockpit of the plane, crumpled like papier-mache on a wheat field; the mother of one young passenger wailing in agony on the floor of the Pan Am terminal; the burned-out center of Lockerbie, Scotland, looking like a British town during the Blitz.

The images resonate not only because of their pain, but because they illustrate precisely what the bombers intended: To tear at the fabric of a society. Criminal justice can and must create a hierarchy of culpability, even among vicious crimes. And none is less forgivable than the intent to terrorize.

That is exactly what a special court in the Netherlands convicted Megrahi of doing. Evidence indicated that his position as head of security for the Libyan state airline was a cover for intelligence work, that he used false passports to travel to Malta and Zurich, the two most important sites in the planning of the attacks, and that he personally purchased the clothes in the suitcase that contained the bomb. He maintained his innocence, but 16 months after his conviction in 2001, Libya itself acknowledged responsibility for the bombing.

Confession, bringing closure to a sad drama, can sometimes be a consideration in granting a terminally ill prisoner a compassionate release. Megrahi hasn’t confessed. He has made no expression of remorse, and there is a real danger that in returning to Tripoli he will be greeted as a hero. His disease, an advanced form of prostate cancer, can still be slow-growing and unpredictable. Scottish officials, however, insist that he has no more than three months to live.

Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish justice minister, declared that Megrahi has had “a sentence imposed by a higher power. It’s one that no court in any jurisdiction in any land can revoke or unroll. It’s terminal, irrevocable, and final - he’s going to die.’’ MacAskill’s statement, which is distasteful in equating cancer with a criminal judgment, also reeks of an untoward certainty, as if MacAskill himself, more than the court or the cancer or the law, is assuming the role of higher power. There may be honorable intentions behind this decision, but MacAskill’s sympathies would be better directed to the victims’ families, who have almost uniformly opposed Megrahi’s release.

Two days after the bombing, a friend of one of the victims, 20-year-old Stephen Boland of Nashua, recalled how she would always buy him Beatles books for Christmas. She had spoken to him in England, as he got ready to come home on Flight 103. “He told me he stood on Abbey Road, and I suppose he is with John Lennon now,’’ she said.

This is an occasion, if one were ever necessary, to think again of Stephen Boland and his fellow passengers.