The Alex Salmond trial

You really need to take this to the Politics thread. It has nothing to do with Trials and Errors.
 
So Craig Murray got 8 months for the jigsaw identification business...

I know little about Scotland, but I´ve been reading about the Salmond trial from Craig´s blog, and also from "Wings over Scotland", after Rolfe (I think) mentioned it, and if what they claim is true, this case really stinks. Is there any (good) reason to think otherwise? Anyone?
 
Abooga said:
So Craig Murray got 8 months for the jigsaw identification business...

I know little about Scotland, but I´ve been reading about the Salmond trial from Craig´s blog, and also from "Wings over Scotland", after Rolfe (I think) mentioned it, and if what they claim is true, this case really stinks. Is there any (good) reason to think otherwise? Anyone?
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I think it's important to decouple Murray's case from Salmond's - they're really not linked at all in judicial terms.

Murray was convicted and sentenced for contempt of court. His offence happened to relate to his public statements during the Salmond trial, but that's as far as any relationship between the two cases goes.
 
Hmmm. Just read Murray's blog post wrt his sentence.

It sure is paradoxical. On the one hand, he and his doctors claim he is too old ("retired" crops up several times) and too chronically ill (a veritable litany of apparently-serious and potentially life-threatening health complaints) to be sent to prison. On the other hand, he claims that he's well enough and fit enough to look after his 2-month-old child - and that this should be a mitigating factor against his imprisonment. His stated medical condition makes it sound like he's on the very brink of serious - even fatal - consequences. But on the other hand he says he would welcome the opportunity to be sentenced to unpaid work. (The court did at least see through that dichotomy by declaring him - on the basis of his own claims of serious physical & mental impairments - unfit to work).

Perhaps the sentencing outcome might have taken all of the above into account - on top of adjudicating for the severity of the offence (very high: he might well have enabled readers to identify the women involved), the seeming lack of remorse, and the relevant sentencing guidelines for this offence.
 
The two cases may not be linked judicially, but they sure are related, and the issue seems to be that Craig Murray has been singled out and delivered a very harsh sentence for a pseudo-crime (he "jigsaw identified" the some women who were not victims of any crime, in fact they are the only ones who probably commited a crime, perjury), but since he seems to be the only one reporting on the defence arguments of the Salmond case, it makes it seem like there has been a political persecution using a non-independent judiciary to shut down an uncomfortable voice and keep the public in the dark about corrupt practices of the Scottish government. This, if true, (and I repeat, I´m not sure if it is, so that´s why I ask here if anyone can show some compelling evidence that it´s not) is the great scandal, not whether CM has lied a little about his medical conditions in order to get a better sentence...
 
https://www.tns2019.org/new-blog-1/2021/5/11/the-end-of-reason

"In Mr Murray’s case, there can be little doubt that the heavy-handed response to an alleged offence that was also commited by a number of other journalists including the BBC’s Kirsty Wark and our own Magnus Linklater, is due to Mr Murray’s very clear support for Alex Salmond during the trial that almost had an innocent man imprisoned."
 
Abooga said:
https://www.tns2019.org/new-blog-1/2021/5/11/the-end-of-reason

"In Mr Murray’s case, there can be little doubt that the heavy-handed response to an alleged offence that was also commited by a number of other journalists including the BBC’s Kirsty Wark and our own Magnus Linklater, is due to Mr Murray’s very clear support for Alex Salmond during the trial that almost had an innocent man imprisoned."
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Well, they would say that wouldn't they.

Maybe they are also in the firing line.

Do you have any evidence for the judiciary being 'none independent' and contempt of court being a 'pseudo crime'?
 
Abooga said:
So Craig Murray got 8 months for the jigsaw identification business...

I know little about Scotland, but I´ve been reading about the Salmond trial from Craig´s blog, and also from "Wings over Scotland", after Rolfe (I think) mentioned it, and if what they claim is true, this case really stinks. Is there any (good) reason to think otherwise? Anyone?
Click to expand...

Honestly haven't followed the ins and outs in enough detail to provide you a detailed analysis but given the two individuals mentioned are what I would call 'raving headcases' my default position would rather be 'is there any good reason to think that what they claim is true'
 
Murray should point to the easiest example of jigsaw ID, committed by COPFS when they redacted a name from the evidence submitted to the Scottish Parliament.
 
Archie Gemmill Goal said:
Honestly haven't followed the ins and outs in enough detail to provide you a detailed analysis but given the two individuals mentioned are what I would call 'raving headcases' my default position would rather be 'is there any good reason to think that what they claim is true'
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Not cool to call Rolfe a "raving headcase" I don't think.
 
It seems to me that the so-called jigsaw identification that Murray is being accused of came in an article in which he quoted all or most of a newspaper article by Dani Garavelli (who is very anti-Salmond) and critiqued it. The identification was in the quotes from Garavelli and Murray actually redacted it a little bit to mitigate this. That's what I remember reading at the time anyway, and I don't think there was anything else. It's all been taken down now anyway, so you can't read about the defence case in the Salmond trial anywhere. Nobody else reported it.

Various people have asked it it's OK for them to quote what Garavelli wrote, and have not been told that it is OK, but Garavelli herself has never been challenged - in fact, judging by her triumphant, gloating tweets, I think she's actually been given an assurance that she won't be charged. Kirsty Wark is another.

I'm no fan of Craig Murray, quite the contrary, but it seems entirely clear that this is a political prosecution to silence the one media outlet that was actually reporting the defence case in the Salmond trial. Murray reported that the mainstream journalists put down their pens when the defence case was being presented. The newspaper articles I read simply repeated prosecution points when reporting the days when the defence case was being heard. Kirsty Wark's TV programme was a disgrace, obviously made with the expectation of a guilty verdict and presenting none of the defence case, just "look what this guy was accused of, isn't it a scandal that he got off, these poor, poor victims, look how they're suffering!" And she committed as much jigsaw identification as Murray, probably more.

One of the Alphabetties was gloating on Twitter about Murray's sentence the other day. I wonder if she got a shock when she realised that most of the replies to her tweet were people saying things about perjury and didn't she think that people who lied on oath should be charged. I thought some of the replies were sailing very close to the wind as regards publicly identifying her as a particular complainant, so we'll see what (if anything) happens about that.
 
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I'm not arguing about Murray, but Stuart Campbell is a friend of mine and about as far from a headcase as you can get in this fevered atmpsphere.
 
Rolfe said:
I'm not arguing about Murray, but Stuart Campbell is a friend of mine and about as far from a headcase as you can get in this fevered atmpsphere.
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Each to their own...I can only go on what I saw of him online... he appeared to go down the same fevered transphobia slide into madness as Linehan and then into a number of 'internet headcase' zones that mean I wouldn't believe anything he said without independent corroboration anymore.

He got kicked off Twitter for being a headcase.
 
Matthew Best said:
Is Wings Over Scotland an individual? It wasn't clear.
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Yes... it was a pseudonym of a pro-independence blogger that started as far as I could tell with reasonable fact checking and stats from a pro-independence perspective and then ended with a descent into transphobia, via fallouts with the SNP, an aborted attempt at their own political party, libel lawsuits and getting kicked off Twitter amongst other things.

I can't say that in this incidence what he said wasn't true, but I would certainly not take it as reliable without fact checking it.
 
He was kicked off Twitter by a concerted reporting campaign by a bunch of people who wanted him gone. They weren't exactly subtle about it.

"He" has a name, which is Stuart Campbell, and he's the one who does the fact-checking, or was. Every article was meticulously referenced and backed up with links to the facts and the primary sources. Nobody has ever, despite challenges, been able to show any factual inaccuracy in anything he wrote.

He was the plaintiff in the defamation lawsuit, not the defendant. He was defamed by the leader of the Labour party in Scotland, that was agreed, but the sheriff decided to find in her favour on a very thin pretext, that she had honestly believed the defamations she uttered.

He didn't attempt to set up his own political party, he floated the idea because he could see that it was going to be the only way to break the toxic stranglehold the SNP has on our body politic. What he really wanted was for Alex Salmond to front a list-only party and that's what was achieved.

You may disagree with him over the matter of men declaring that they're women, I did at one time too before it became obvious that he'd been right all along, but the "fallouts with the SNP" is another matter. The SNP is a toxic bin fire right now, and I just don't know how long it's going to take for some people to see it. Maybe when St Nicola of the Perpetual Indyref Promises comes back asking for just one more mandate and this time she really means it, in 2026, they might start to get it.
 
Rolfe said:
The SNP is a toxic bin fire right now,
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A pretty good description of the end days of Wings online content. Transphobia isn't needed in an independent Scotland or anywhere else. It does seem to be the hill that some people want to die on but dying on it does nothing for their credibility.

The problem with him (or rather his public utterances I dont know him personally) was that he was always a bit of a dick while pursuing his aim of supporting independence who rapidly became a supporter of independence while pursuing his aim of being a bit (?) of a dick.
 
Well, I do happen to know him personally and in my opinion you're entirely wrong in your uncharitable assessment. If you happen to believe that letting men enter and occupy all women's spaces is the most important reason for becoming an independent country then we're never going to agree of course.

Wings singlehandedly did more for the independence cause in 2014 than any other individual. If he had been supported to get his material out to a larger proportion of the population, and a bit earlier, it could actually have swung it. The Wings site is far and away the most valuable resource in fact-checking and debunking unionist myths and talking-points that there is, and I hope it can be preserved in an accessible form for the future.

It's just sad to see that those opposed to women's rights take this as their all-encompassing criterion and damn the best resource the independence movement had simply because he stands up for women.
 
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