Over the last week or so, I’ve been churning this post around in my head – and it’s still a work in progress. I’ve written about it before on a couple of occasions, but in the last ten days there have been two big – and well-publicised – court cases based around conspiracies, and planning to commit offences.

In one case, two boys in Manchester were supposedly planning to blow up their school  – and have now been found innocent of all charges, and there’s a small ruckus going on about whether the entire thing was actually a total waste of time and money. The second one (although it actually came first chronologically) was of course the ‘liquid bomb’ plot to detonate bombs in mid-air on several flights. They were found guilty, and this week got sentenced to incredibly long terms ( between 32 and 40 years each)

Now I can’t deny, I find I have a real problem with people going to court to answer a case that they were thinking about doing something bad.

Obviously, I haven’t been in the court hearings on either case, so I don’t know the true weight of evidence in either case. I just find myself uncomfortable with the concept of having people get taken to court and going through epic legal proceedings for an offence that has been talked about, but not actually committed.

Mind you, in my opinion terrorism is the ‘child porn’ of the 2000s, it’s the Big Bad Thing where people appear to say “Oh, well if [the accused] was into that then they’re beyond the pale, just lock ‘em up and throw away the key”. It’s the “Ultimate Offence”, or whatever.

I suppose that the difference between the cases is that with the aeroplane bomb plan the people had actually put together the things they needed, whereas the Manchester one appears to have been more about talk and ‘let’s do that’ discussions, rather than serious preparation.

Even with that though – and I totally acknowledge the difference between ‘planning’ and ‘making the things necessary in preparation’ – I keep coming back to the entire concept of being able to be tried for an offence that hasn’t actually been committed. After all, isn’t that pretty much what Orwell described in “1984″ as “Mindcrime”?