Enough for California

Ours is a fairly typical suburban wardrobe in that when you open it quite a lot just falls out. A year ago the avalanche would have included bags stuffed full of unused Christmas cards amongst the sweaters, handbags and toilet rolls for which there is no other home. This peculiar form of hoarding went on for several years but it wasn’t because I’m a big fan of the season. I don’t do Christmas. The hundreds of cards that took up space in and then on the wardrobe as the year went on represented my commitment to a particular human rights issue, as they were intended for prisoners across the United States who are on death row.

Following a conversation with a member of an organisation that befriends them I came across some unused cards at the back of a cupboard. I wondered how many other people had a few left over every January and if any were willing to donate them. I had learned that the number of DR prisoners was so great (over 3000) that it was too expensive to send them all a card at Christmas, even though it might be the only one they got. Friends and family are often thin on the ground when you’re in that situation. I mentioned my idea to a contact at a local church and was rewarded a few weeks later with several bulging carrier bags. By now it was late October. I called one of the organisation’s co-ordinators and told her I had some cards. She didn’t sound terribly impressed.

“How many do you have?” “About six hundred.” There was a moment’s silence. “That’s enough for California. This year everyone gets a card.”

It took a couple of years to get going but eventually it became an annual ritual to ask for cards on Freecycle in the early weeks of the New Year. January found me trudging round the suburbs with my trusty A to Z, collecting donations. To these were added the cards sent to me by members of sympathetic groups, some from as far away as Australia. The strange thing is that I ended up with around six hundred every year, apart from one occasion when I was fifteen short of a thousand.

When it got to September I would begin to sift out any inappropriate ones which could mean anything from the pornographic (Santa‘s little helper in fishnets) to the relentlessly cheerful (“Have a great Christmas with your family and friends!”). I was given humorous ones with a cartoon of frantic Christmas shoppers outside a travel agent’s window. “Seven more escaping days to Christmas!” said the poster. I didn’t think the censors would laugh. I also separated the overtly religious ones because while some condemned prisoners develop a strong religious faith many others feel God wasn’t there when they needed him most.

Why have I stopped doing it? The final straw came when I found I had wasted quite a lot of time visiting the same bit of West London twice in bitterly cold weather because someone who was really keen to donate forgot to leave the package out the first time. Just to make things worse, when I sorted them out it turned out that she had written something in around a third of them and then put them back into the pack! This followed being given used ones by those who misunderstood the request. I thought of all the cards I could have bought with the fares I had wasted and felt there must be a better way of doing it.

Why do it in the first place? Sometimes a Christmas card is all that a prisoner can cope with because he or she can’t read. Someone else has to read their mail to them. Apart from that just because I think Christmas is an over-commercialised and shallow event it doesn’t mean it can’t seem a little magical to someone who has very little. When you become involved in prison reform it is the denial and importance of ordinary things in the life of an inmate that tends to strike you. Asking for them was also a way of raising awareness about the issue. Most people have an opinion about it but not much knowledge. There’s often an assumption that everyone given a death sentence has received adequate representation in court - the reality is that it depends on your bank balance. That often determines how good your defence will be. If you are very lucky you will attract the support of a human rights organisation but that tends to happen once the appeals stage is reached. Some of the nicest cards I received came from Yatombi Ikei who was himself poorly represented during his trial and has raised some serious questions about the issue.

Murder and sudden violent death must seem a million miles away from the average person’s experience, the whole subject imbued with a dark glamour. In truth, murder is often mundane, triggered by trivial and ridiculous events. It isn’t generally about gangsters and drug deals. The perpetrator isn’t always the fearsome stranger you bolt your doors against at night. I appreciate that the family of a victim may derive something from the death of the person who killed their loved one but I’ve wondered how it’s supposed to work when both the victim and the condemned are from the same close family circle. Put yourself in the place of Jon Flinner who lost his mother to cancer, his stepmother to murder and then his father to death row for the killing. Raising awareness of their father’s plight is not how most people expect to spend their teenage years but he has done so very successfully via Twitter.

Most of us come no closer to a personal experience of the criminal justice system than a brief contact with the police. Occasionally things go further and this may involve being a juror or giving evidence at a hearing, as I have. I played a very insignificant part in a relatively insignificant case but it was made rather more daunting by the fact that it took place at the Central Criminal Court in the City of London, better known as the Old Bailey. Some of the most serious trials have taken place there, including capital cases when the death penalty was still carried out in the UK.

Seen close up the process of justice was boring and sad. The things that seemed so exotic in court room dramas became ordinary, dulled by the hours of waiting that it involved. Until then I had no idea just how much time police officers are obliged to spend hanging about. It is impossible to forget that you are sharing a waiting room with people who may have seen terrible things. I got used to seeing people drift about in black robes. A barrister’s wig, caught in his fingers under a stack of paperwork, seemed like a small limp animal set aside for lunch.

Waiting to give evidence in those grey green marble halls made me think of being under the surface of a lake, watching the sunlight filter through the drifting weed, glinting on the golden figure of Justice far above me. Considering that witnesses have over the centuries described some of the worst human behaviour on that site the gloom seemed appropriate. And far below me what is left of Newgate Prison was a reminder of all those whose legal defence had not been good enough, many of whom were executed just outside in the street that gives the place its name.

When the moment came it was, as a police officer had said, like theatre but the acting was wooden. There were no Oscar winning performances. The dialogue between a barrister and a witness is somewhere between a pavane and a bull fight. Depending on who you are giving evidence for they’ll either dance with you or spear you and some are better dancers than others. The Old Bailey’s version of Lady Justice is not blind as she stands against the London skyline with her sword and scales and it occurred to me that she probably knows a good barrister when she sees one.

In spite of what goes on there those tasked with the day to day running of the place manage to retain an astonishing degree of humanity. They seemed truly impartial and I was humbled by their cheerful and professional attitude as they guided ordinary and occasionally frightened people through their visit. When I hear someone say that it should be a life for a life I wonder how they would react to what I was told by a member of staff, that for a period it was common for the victims, witnesses and defendants to be so young that their ages were almost in single figures. The notice board full of child art took on a new significance. Drawn by someone’s kid brother or sister, not their kid. One very short life for another.

In the end the experience confirmed what I had already believed for some time, that such life or death decisions should never, never depend on the opinions of fallible human beings. I have never been so glad that all we have left from the bad old days are the wigs but I also feel profoundly sad at the thought that a belief in truth and justice is something you can grow out of, just as I once believed that Jesus was born in a stable and that Santa eats all those mince pies.