Scottish compassion doesn't just apply to high profile cases

When Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi was released from a Scottish prison on compassionate grounds it caused a lot of passionate feelings to come forward. Radio phone-ins, online message boards and newspaper letters columns were full of people venting opinion both in agreement and against Kenny MacAskill's decision.

My feeling was that the Scottish Justice Secretary had got it right, and that our society is better for showing such compassion. Of course conspiracies abounded and unusually there was some truth to this as Jack Straw has said that oil and trade considerations played a part in setting up a Prisoner Transfer Agreement with Libya.

I did wonder how common it was for prisoners to be released on compassionate grounds, and whether the nature of their offences affected this at all, but I hadn't seen any information about this anywhere. So I went to www.whatdotheyknow.com and used the guidance available there to make my first request under the Freedom of Information Act. I wanted to know how many prisoners in Scotland had applied for release on compassionate grounds, how many were granted their freedom, what crimes they had been convicted of and how long their sentences had been. To provide a limit to the scope of the request I asked for information going back to the start of the Scottish Parliament in 1999.

Today I got a response, exactly 20 working days after making my request.

The headline is that 33 prisoners applied for early release on compassionate grounds and that 26 had this granted (79%).

Five of the 26 were serving life for murder and one for culpable homicide.

15 were due to be in jail for five years or more - assuming they'd serve their whole sentence.

So what does this add to the debate? It looks as if Mr MacAskill was acting along the line of other such decisions made by theScottish government, and Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi certainly isn't the only person to be treated with such compassion by Scotland.

Reporting Statistics - when 25% isn't 25 out of 100.

Statistics often raise problems for journalists. Clearly some journalists don't get numbers, or find the concepts involved difficult to communicate.

Drive on BBC Radio Five Live today ran an interview with Jillian Satin on this story linking depression with reduced cancer survival rates. It's on the iPlayer here for the next week or so (about 2 hours 52 minutes in).

At the end of the interview I didn't feel much more informed than before. Some of that has to be down to Anita Anand who did the interview, but the contributor didn't do much to help either. For instance, when asked about the significance of the increased risk, she said "When we hear 25% we think of 25 out of 100, and that's not the right way to interpret it."

That made me stop and think for a bit, and put me off the rest of the piece. What I was hoping for was a clear explanation of how I should think of this 25% increase in probability. Unfortunately that wasn't forthcoming. Part of this is a problem with the format - Five Live tends to favour brevity, but on this occasion the item, and contributor, deserved more time.

As a listener I felt let down - the story is interesting and deserved a proper explanation, but Jillian Satin's answers didn't help explain her work and Anita Anand's questioning didn't give her the opportunity to tell the story.