Leader: Unorthodox parole rule is deeply unsettling

Published on Saturday 28 January 2012 02:44

TOMMY Sheridan, former leader of the Scottish Socialist Party, might have considered himself fortunate. He was convicted on five counts of perjury and given a three-year jail sentence. Having served a year, he is now allowed out on parole.

However, as part of his parole conditions, the Scottish Prison Service has imposed a ban on public speaking so that he experiences similar conditions to that of a prison inmate. In other words, he may be out, but he is not yet free.

However correctly this may conform to the spirit of parole limitation, this is an odd, unsettling ruling. It would appear to establish a new category of citizen: one who is released from prison but whose right to publicly voice an opinion has been suspended.

In the case of Mr Sheridan, a firebrand politician, this stricture effectively deprives him of his principal business: broadcasting opinions. The law is on thin ice when it chooses to regard the denial of the right to make a public statement a legitimate constraint. Mr Sheridan’s former prison inmates may feel relieved. But he and his companions may see this constraint as particularly irksome, given the public debate on the referendum issue.

And what is a public statement exactly? If he still protests his innocence, is he not entitled to say that he feels hard done by? Expressing an opinion in public is a right not to be taken away lightly, not least for the precedent it may set.

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Kobi

Monday, January 30, 2012 at 02:33 PM

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americanbob

Saturday, January 28, 2012 at 12:08 PM

What is possibly more "unsettling" is that someone, rightly or wrongly convicted and given a three year term, is put into an open prison after six months, allowed to go home at weekends, and let out altogether after a year! What is the point of such sentences if they do not mean what they say! If Mr. Sheridan feels he is innocent he should have appealed his sentence, not colluded with the authorities by keeping shtum, in order to get out earlier!

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gus1940

Saturday, January 28, 2012 at 08:18 AM

I hope that The Scottish Government will waste no time in knocking on the head this blatant denial of the right to free speech.

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