My learned friend

Having posted on this earlier, it's only fitting to note that Melbourne QC Robert Richter has made a partial retraction of comments he made during a public rally to mark the passing of Nguyen Tuong Van. He now regrets any 'misunderstanding' of his earlier comments that the hanging of Nguyen was worse than the atrocities committed against Allied POWs in Changi during the Second World War. Apparently Richter got in a few other sprays during that speech, against George W. Bush, naturally, and right-to-life protesters who, being the vile hypocrites that they are, are somehow more concerned with the lives of unborn children than they are with the lives of competent adults who choose to run drugs through jurisdictions with mandatory death penalties.

Richter is the second example I've seen (Geoffrey Robertson being the other) of men with unquestionably brilliant legal minds, who become indistinguishable from the dumbest, dippiest media studies undergraduate the moment they open their mouths on politics. And we won't easily forget Richter's statement that the brutalities of Japanese guards in Changi were committed "in the heat of war" (I quote from memory). Well, no they weren't, and even if they were, surely the same defence could then be used of Lynndie England and her friends?