http://martinkelly.blogspot.com/2009/08 ... -wing.html"Yet the fact that he was paid does not of itself compromise the value of his evidence in any way. If it did, every conviction obtained for which 'Crimestoppers' has offered a reward should be considered unsafe. Anyone suggesting that in public? No.
...
I'm a bit rusty, I know, but I was unaware that the Scottish law of evidence contains a blanket ban forbidding potential witnesses to read newspapers.
...
If this alone renders Megrahi's conviction unsafe, then every conviction obtained through the medium of Crimewatch, whether through its salacious crime-porn dramatisations or by the appeals of the photogenic WPC's.....must also be considered unsafe.
...
For all of the law of Scotland's legion faults - the laws on the collection of municipal debt still remain barbarically mid-Victorian, for example, a state of affairs which a decade of devolution has done nothing to improve - Scotland's judges are clean. They have always been clean. I cannot bring myself to believe anything else; and for anything else to be said is, in my opinion, mischief-making. Dalyell's late father in law was once Scotland's second highest-ranking judge. Perhaps there is merit in the maxim that familiarity breeds contempt.
...
Scottish civic nationalism is not renowned for its principles - the SNP's preposterous adoption of the title 'The Scottish Government' to describe its minority devolved Scottish Executive is a particularly egregious case in point - yet when it was forced to act on principle, to stand up for the law of Scotland, it did. Faced with an impossibly high profile convict, medical reports from hell, Hillary Clinton, the Libyans, Christine Grahame putting in her typically vocal and unhelpful tuppenceworth and the sure and certain knowledge that the press and his political opponents would crucify him whatever he did, he took a difficult decision which under the law of Scotland only he could make."