My current high priority campaign is for the provision of a trauma centre for miscarriage of justice victims. The following is an article I wrote for The New Statesman which gives the circumstances behind my involvement in this new campaign and my work with MOJO - The Miscarriages of Justice Organisation.

“I spent a lifetime in jail for a murder I never committed`, he said. These were final moments in the short, lost life, of Stuart Gair, 44. A heart monitor pronounced him dead on the worn sitting room carpet where he lay. The noise from the defibrilllator blew the tolerances of the radio transmitter that was recording the last minutes of a man who had died, in truth, many years before his cardiac arrest.Sitting on a thread bare sofa, in a thread bare one bedroom flat, against the bleak surrounding walls – Stuart Gair, gave the impression that he had not left the prison that had been his home for nearly 12years.

These events followed a routine 999 request for assistance, one Friday night in Edinburgh.  There days later, a consultant from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary phoned to tell me that Stuart’s heart had stopped again and he was now in a coma. There was no hope of recovery. He [1]asked me for permission to turn off his life support machine.

No family or friends could be found and the only connection the hospital had between the dead and the living was a reporter who was on a tour of duty with an Edinburgh Ambulance Service.

These events, that had me struggling for breath myself, as I considered the life and death of a man, I had known for such a short time.
This unfolding drama started out innocuously enough.  I was shadowing Paul a 32 year, paramedic on a routine assignment while he worked the front line of life’s traumas in his car response unit. A cameraman sat in the back of the estate car filming while I peppered Paul with questions. We all waited eagerly, adrenalin on standby, for the radio instructions from the emergency control centre.

But it was the customary cardiac call outs that made up the bulk of the emergency requests during the eight hour shift.  Stuart Gair’s call was one of those.  “Nothing out of the ordinary”, Paul assured me en route.

Stuart’s voice though, in death, is certainly being listened to, as his story becomes the focus of a new campaign to support `life after life`  - the creation of support programmes for miscarriage victims to help them cope with the world again.
“The worst thing to happen to Stuart Gair, was to release him from prison”, John Macmanus, told the congregation, at Daldowie Crematorium in the Glasgow’s east end. “He should have been released as an innocent man with the same planning and consideration given to the guilty.”

The truths that sit behind this bland Court utterance, however, are more lurid. The background tells tales of pressurised witnesses, serious allegations of Police corruption, lies and fabrication which leave a terrible stench over the Scottish judicial system and the Strathclyde Police.
At best, his conviction was a mistake borne out of an extraordinary catalogue of failures and errors by the Police and Prosecution. Whatever the truth, the result was that Stuart spent most of his 12 years in solitary confinement. He was further rewarded a heroin habit and Hepatitis A. 

Caught halfway between guilt and innocence during that time, he inevitably perhaps, returned to the streets from whence he came.

Immediately upon his release from prison, Gair, stayed with the prison doctor who highlighted his case. When he was found injecting heroin in the house, he was asked to leave. Other floors and needles later and he found himself arrested three times on drugs charges. He even stole from his disabled mother.  He was dealing; and was stored the heroin in her nursing home.

A little boy who never knew his dad, a teenage petty thief fitted up for murder; a jailbird junkie on a mission to self-destruction; and finally a man on the road to happiness with a misfiring heart that he never knew about.

After her release, she said: “The whole world is so huge. Since my release, things have got worse, not better. In the first few weeks I seemed to be adjusting well. Now I am devastated that I seem to be going backwards. I have to stop what I am doing, over and over. I can’t cope”
She was sentenced to two life sentences in 1999 and spent more than three years in prison.. She was found to have been wrongly convicted in January 2003 after new medical evidence emerged.
Her experience is a common one for miscarriage victims.
 

The wrongly convicted and their families commonly face psychological difficulties and problems of adjustment that are severe, bewildering, and unexpected. “Typically, for years they had been focused on achieving the goal of release, but once this had been achieved and celebrated there were painful discoveries that they had changed, there were losses that could not be remedied, and the lives they previously had, could not be recovered”, Dr Adrian Gounds,[5] at Cambridge Criminology Department, said.

  It was particularly tragic, he said, to hear some admit that the years of imprisonment had been easier to cope with than the years since release.  He has interviewed 30 miscarriage cases for a paper shortly to be published and the research, he insists, clearly, indicates a compelling case of need for services of support and help for these complex and longstanding problems. 

Hill and Gair and others like them are thrown out from prison with no treatment or support which would in the case of the guilty would normally be provided to help re-equip them with the skills to reengage with society.

They often return to their home towns and build their own segregation units and effectively place themselves in their own solitary confinement with multiple locks on every door and little human contact.
“Because they have refused to admit their guilt in prison they are denied parole and release preparation schemes and their abuse is compounded”, says McManus. He and Hill are leading the MOJO campaign to set up a permanent retreat and a treatment programme for victims of miscarriages of justice.

There has to be preparation, family therapy, support and counseling according to Dr Grounds.  He said the attempt by MOJO to secure a retreat would in some small way give back to them a little bit of what society stole from them.

Attending Gair’s cremation, Paddy Hill’s sunken and sodden eyes, spoke of every lost minute of freedom he personally endured while `held hostage` by the justice system. He seemingly, grieved too, for all the missing hours, days and years that were suffered by those, for whom he now campaigns.
 

In unseasonable winter sunshine outside the east end crematorium, walking at half mast and sweating hurt, Paddy Hill let the tears go.  I found it hard myself not to cry as his family rushed to support him, interlocking arms, and squeezing hands.

Paddy Hill is still fighting for counselling. His local NHS is discussing the financial arrangements for it but Hill feels that the Home Office should pay and not the NHS. “They put me there so make them pay.”

More disturbing, is that Hill and others, have had to pay living expenses out of their compensation for wrongful conviction, following a law Lord ruling last March[7] which said not to deduct such expenses while staying at her majesty’s pleasure would be to over compensate them.

“We are angrier now that at anytime since our arrest”, Hill tells me. “No one has had to pay for the forced confessions, the perjured witness statements and the lies. We live with this every day,” Gerry Conlon says, gesticulating forcefully.

“While half a million pounds of taxpayers money has been spent on looking after Maxine Carr,[8] not a penny has been put on the table to support the rehabilitation of the innocent who have left prison, Hill says. “We are not saying the guilty don’t need or deserve this support but before the innocent?”

Concerns are mounting now, though, for the newly released Kenny Richey[9]who was just an hour from execution after his wrongful conviction for murder in the States. After 21 years in jail, he has now returned to the UK - Not though, into the hands of counsellors, but into the hands of the entrepreneurial, Max Clifford. Now that’s a worrying thought.

After the lights went out on the monitor reporting Gair’s last coma pulse, the bedside team returned to the flat, Stuart and I had departed, the previous Friday night. It gave no hint of the trauma that took place. It remained meticulously uncluttered. His personal artefacts were few.
A book entitled `Buddhism for Sheep` lay on his bedside table. `69` at San Quentin`, one of Johnny Cash's prison classics  was resting there too, Under the sitting room armchair was an `Alabama 3` disc (famous for opening track to the Sopranos). He spoke of them to me before his heart stopped. They had played a gig for MOJO in August. Stuart had been there.

The critical contents, though, his of 44 years were to be found, in his wash bag. Inside was a picture of his mum, who is now dead and a copy of his birth certificate, glaring omission of dad, included. There was another omission - A secret legacy; a 19 year old daughter who never got to know her own father - Stuart.

Some one knew and tipped off the papers and journalists soon made it to her door and reconnected the father and daughter in death. She was not at the funeral. Pregnant and still stunned by the news of her real father and his confused life, she kept a low profile

As Stuart’s daughter contemplated motherhood and her new found heritage, the press hunted her down again to discuss another legacy of Stuart’s – the million pounds in compensation due her for Stuart’s wrongful conviction. As the only relative she entitled to receive it.
That is just the start in life that Stuart would have wanted to give to his grandchild. Perhaps though, his greatest legacy with be a trauma retreat, serving and protecting the brutalised innocent from their own anger and the system’s indifference.             

End