The Ascent of Man

The prisoners in the condemned section of the Royal Gaol occupy cells that are eight feet by ten. There is room for a bed, a table, a chair, and a pail. Death row is a damp, claustrophobic and unprivate place. No natural light shines there. This explains why the prisoners, who are aired for one hour a day, are very fair-skinned and why their eyesight quickly deteriorates. The affliction is significant: many of the men — female murderers are held in another prison — like nothing better than to read and answer letters. For overseas correspondence, the prisoners are issued with blue air letters — sheets of paper that fold into envelopes — imprinted with the spectacular image of a long-necked, long-billed, red-feathered bird. This is the scarlet ibis, the national bird of Trinidad. The scarlet ibis also features in the standard series of stamps, which celebrates the country’s renowned avian life. Should you receive a letter from a condemned man in Trinidad, the chances are that it will be stamped with the image of a channel-billed toucan or green-rumped parrotlet or fork-tailed flycatcher or bay-headed tanager.

These exotic, pathetic missives would occasionally reach London at the chambers of Mark Strachan QC, at 1 Crown Office Row, in the Temple. Although the chambers dealt principally in business law, for over fifty years it had esoterically specialized in Privy Council work. There was no ideological slant to this: it was not uncommon for a barrister from the chambers to act for a state on one occasion and against it on another. Nor was it unusual, or a problem, for members of the same chambers to oppose each other on an appeal. In the case of Ramnath Harrilal, for example, James Guthrie QC, instructed by the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, was opposed by me.

When I received the Harrilal papers in late 1997, I had been called to the Bar for ten years. Nevertheless, I was a novice in the field of criminal appeals. I had very little experience of criminal work, and the only time I’d appeared before the Law Lords — a case concerning an oil spill in Scotland — I’d not been called on to address the court. My practice had been mainly devoted to business law and employment law. However, I had from time to time received a few random letters from death row. Written in the humble, rambling, supplicant, God-fearing genre almost uniformly adopted by death row correspondents, they begged for my assistance in respect of cloudy, near-incomprehensible grievances about prison conditions and judicial injustices. I wish that I could report a selfless, soul-searching response to these demands on my conscience and time — all such work is pro bono — but in fact I was grateful for the professional rule that barristers cannot communicate directly with a client. The letters were passed to a solicitor to undertake necessary inquiries and correspondence and, if it seemed the client might have a case, instruct a barrister to advise and draft the necessary legal proceedings. In this way, my involvement with death row inmates was limited to writing short, invariably discouraging opinions concerning the alleged infringement of their constitutional rights. The Harrilal brief was different.

The court documents told the following story. Sylvia Maraj, the mother of a four-year-old boy named Jerry, had been seeing Ramnath ‘Dread’ Harrilal, a twenty-eight-year-old forestry worker, on and off for around two years. It was not a secure relationship, but nor was it violent; and Ramnath Harrilal had no police record of any kind. In the early evening of June 27, 1985, the couple quarrelled. There was obscure evidence about the subject of the dispute: it seemed that Dread criticized Sylvia for drinking alcohol against her doctor’s orders (she was on medication for a nervous breakdown), that Sylvia told Dread to go and bathe because he stank, and that Sylvia shouted about wanting her passport. At any rate, late in the night, things turned violent. The two ‘scrambled’ on the bed, and then Sylvia, who was physically a match for her boyfriend, went for him once more, perhaps armed with a bottle or a knife. Harrilal seized an L-shaped iron implement he’d fashioned for digging holes for tomato plants, and with it struck his girlfriend two or three times on the head. She fell to the ground. He tried to revive her by slapping water on her face, but couldn’t. So he beheaded Sylvia Maraj, chopped up her torso and limbs, and did his best to hide the body parts. The following morning, an old friend called Tattoo stopped by and asked to use Harrilal’s latrine. Harrilal told Tattoo that he couldn’t use the latrine because Sylvia’s chopped-up body was there. Tattoo went to the police. When the post-mortem was conducted, something odd turned up. It transpired that the initial blows with the piece of iron had merely knocked out Sylvia Maraj; it was the shock and haemorrhage of multiple chop wounds, dismemberment and decapitation that had killed her.

Ramnath Harrilal was convicted of the murder of Sylvia Maraj and sentenced to death in 1988. The conviction was quashed by the Trinidad and Tobago Court of Appeal in 1993, but in 1996, after a retrial, he was reconvicted and resentenced to death. A second appeal to the Trinidad and Tobago Court of Appeal failed; indeed, Harrilal’s counsel helplessly stated to the court that there were no grounds of appeal that he could advance.

Reviewing the documents, I didn’t dwell on this last fact. It is not uncommon for Trinidadian attorneys to miss points that seem obvious to their London counterparts — not so much a reflection on the competence of Trinidadian Bar but rather of the advantage enjoyed by an appellate lawyer fresh to a case. I had never laid eyes on or spoken to my client, had not participated in the trial or appeal, knew nothing about the scene of the crime or the reality of its protagonists’ lives. This remoteness would have been a problem if my job had been to get to the bottom of what happened thousands of miles away on a night thirteen years ago; but that wasn’t my job. My task was to take the material available and construct from it the narrative most favourable to the client, and the less constrained I was by first-hand impressions of what had happened, the better. Of course, any exculpatory edifice I built had to be founded in reality. Contrary to the impression sometimes gained in Trinidad, the Privy Council only entertained appeals if it was satisfied that there was a real possibility that the petitioner had suffered a substantive injustice; and most petitions for leave to appeal were dismissed.

Harrilal’s physical actions were clear and horrifying. But, as everybody knows, an act only acquires a particular criminal quality if it coincides with a particular mental state; and a homicide will only be murder if it is committed with an intention to kill or cause really serious injury. It was quickly clear to me that if a defence lay anywhere, it was in the killer’s mind. What had driven Ramnath Harrilal, a man of previous good character, to butcher Sylvia Maraj?

Harrilal’s trial lawyer had invited the jury to consider the same question. He put it to them that the deranged character of the killing indicated a deranged mind. He urged them to accept the defence of diminished responsibility — i.e., the accused suffered from an abnormality of mind induced by injury or disease — and to deliver the non-capital verdict of manslaughter. He pointed to the accused’s evidence that, as a teenager, he’d been hospitalized with head injuries sustained in a bicycling accident which had caused him to suffer from dizziness, mood changes and anxiety, and he pointed to psychiatric evidence that the head injuries caused Harrilal to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition capable of triggering sudden uncontrollable rages.

But the jury never got to consider these submissions on their merits, because for some reason the judge remarked in his summing up that there was no evidence of post-traumatic stress disorder. That, I thought to myself, was a material misdirection right there.

But it was pretty threadbare stuff. The bicycling accident had occurred perhaps thirteen years before the date of the homicide, there were no hospital records to confirm the head injuries, and there was no evidence of other episodes of uncontrolled rage. There was, I thought, a more likely story of what had happened that night. After he’d knocked out Sylvia Maraj, Harrilal had tried to revive her. Only after his attempts at resuscitation had failed did he mutilate her ‘body’. In other words, he had killed Sylvia in the mistaken belief that he was disposing of a corpse — and not with any intent to kill or injure. Was this murder, or was it manslaughter?

The precedents were far from clear. I looked into a history of inconsistent decisions from India, New Zealand, Basutoland, Rhodesia, South Africa and England, cases in which the victims had been throttled then set on fire; strangled then thrown into a river (two such cases); struck on the head then rolled over a cliff; assaulted with an axe and then placed in an antbear hole; smashed on the skull with a heavy object and then gagged and dumped in an offal pit; and hit with a truncheon and then tossed into a harbour with breeze blocks attached to the legs. In all cases, the first violent act produced unconsciousness and the second produced death. In all cases the courts had difficulty in defining the exact state of mind of a murderer, a problem which in part arose, of course, from the psychological and moral impenetrability of the conduct in question. Who really knows what to make of people who commit such terrible acts?

I drew up a petition on behalf of Ramnath Harrilal. In February 1998, after a short hearing before three Law Lords, Harrilal was granted leave to appeal as a poor person to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council.