Sunday Post, the details
Sep. 28th, 2009 12:27 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
daibhidcSo here's the details on the Sunday Post thing.
In the continued effort to find more stuff to get hysterical about re: the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Sunday Post has discovered that Kenny MacAskill has released ''everyone'' who applied for compassionate release, whereas his Labour predecessors rejected "over a quarter" of applications[1].
This was their front page story, under the headline "MACASKILL RELEASED MORE MURDERERS IN 30 MONTHS THAN LABOUR DID IN EIGHT YEARS".
Somewhere in the middle of the ranting, the Post has buried some actual numbers, which tell a slightly different story.
Firstly, MacAskill has had exactly the same number of murderers applying for compassionate release in the last 30 months as Labour had during their 8 years, so the comparision of timescales in the headline is meaningless. And strictly, he didn't release "more murderers", plural; he released one more murderer for a total of three, whereas Labour released two, and rejected one.
If I tossed a coin and it came up H-H-T, and then another coin and it came up H-H-H, I wouldn't conclude that there was something suspicious about the second coin.
But that's just the murderers. What about everyone else? I mean, MacAskill's just opening the gates and letting them walk out, right?
Well ... he's certainly accepted all the cases that have come before him thus far. But that's only seven cases. Labour looked at 26 and only rejected 7[2]. And since the Post doesn't give us any further information about the cases, it's impossible to judge whether any of the cases MacAskill has seen would, in fact, have been rejected by Labour. It's certainly not without the bounds of possibility that the reason he's accepted all the cases that have come before him is that all the cases that have come before him were within the guidelines he's supposed to follow.
[1]Specifically 0.269. You can tell the slant on the story by the phrasing. If they wanted Labour to be "soft on crime", it would have been "only a quarter".
[2]I'd also be interested to know if any of the prisoners the Labour Justice Ministers believed weren't going to die within three months did, in fact, die within three months.
In the continued effort to find more stuff to get hysterical about re: the release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the Sunday Post has discovered that Kenny MacAskill has released ''everyone'' who applied for compassionate release, whereas his Labour predecessors rejected "over a quarter" of applications[1].
This was their front page story, under the headline "MACASKILL RELEASED MORE MURDERERS IN 30 MONTHS THAN LABOUR DID IN EIGHT YEARS".
Somewhere in the middle of the ranting, the Post has buried some actual numbers, which tell a slightly different story.
Firstly, MacAskill has had exactly the same number of murderers applying for compassionate release in the last 30 months as Labour had during their 8 years, so the comparision of timescales in the headline is meaningless. And strictly, he didn't release "more murderers", plural; he released one more murderer for a total of three, whereas Labour released two, and rejected one.
If I tossed a coin and it came up H-H-T, and then another coin and it came up H-H-H, I wouldn't conclude that there was something suspicious about the second coin.
But that's just the murderers. What about everyone else? I mean, MacAskill's just opening the gates and letting them walk out, right?
Well ... he's certainly accepted all the cases that have come before him thus far. But that's only seven cases. Labour looked at 26 and only rejected 7[2]. And since the Post doesn't give us any further information about the cases, it's impossible to judge whether any of the cases MacAskill has seen would, in fact, have been rejected by Labour. It's certainly not without the bounds of possibility that the reason he's accepted all the cases that have come before him is that all the cases that have come before him were within the guidelines he's supposed to follow.
[1]Specifically 0.269. You can tell the slant on the story by the phrasing. If they wanted Labour to be "soft on crime", it would have been "only a quarter".
[2]I'd also be interested to know if any of the prisoners the Labour Justice Ministers believed weren't going to die within three months did, in fact, die within three months.
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Date: 2009-09-28 03:16 pm (UTC)