DATA ANALYSIS > Page 19

He recognises that his personality has changed. "Before, I was a ladies' man, a right extrovert. I could still bed a few girls, but I can't be bothered. I'm a completely different person." He was diagnosed by three doctors as having post traumatic stress disorder and still sees a trauma psychiatrist every week. He was prescribed medication, but he refused to take it. He doesn't take the counselling very seriously either, although he concedes that, "some of it is helping me." He adds, "I didn't want anything to do with anything official."

  He meditates to deal with the anger he feels. "I don't hate any individual, because that's a destructive emotion. But when I think about it I do get angry about what they've done to me. I'll never trust them. I still get depressed, slip deeply into it. But now I get out and go for a drive."

  There have been problems with his family. "I can't really communicate with people. I'm happier on my own.....It is hard with my family, two sisters and a brother. Sometimes I said things that upset them. Now I hold my tongue. I speak too many truths and they can't handle it."

  He too has a problem in showing emotion. "My girlfriend thinks that I don't care, because I've learned not to show my emotions. Everything's blase. I don't get excited about anything, which is a legacy of being let down so badly. I don't think I'm cold.....I feel like a fraud unless I'm very frank."

JOHN KAMARA

In 1981 John was sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of a betting shop manager. He had a history of petty crime. but had also served four and a half years for an armed robbery.

  He thought that things would be put to rights at his first appeal hearing, but they weren't. He immediately began to fight to try to establish his innocence. He wouldn't accept the prison regime and refused to work, just wanting to concentrate on his case. Of the nearly twenty years he served before release at the age of 47 he spent almost sixteen of them in solitary confinement, with one continuous four and a half year period.

  He suffered deep depression, frustration and anger, but helped to dissipate it through writing letters to anyone he thought might be able to help him. He wrote to every MP in the UK and also to the President of the US. By the end of his sentence he had received 378,000 letters in reply.

  When it eventually came, release was abrupt in the extreme. He was taken from his cell to the Appeal Court in the Strand. Within hours he was put out into the street with several boxes of his belongings, a discharge grant of £46 and a travel warrant. However, he had nowhere to go.

  Luckily for him, Paddy Hill took him in to live with him. Also fortuitously, a BBC TV 'Rough Justice' camera crew had arranged to film his first weeks of release. They followed him around as he tried to come to terms with freedom after twenty years inside. John says that the filming really helped him and was almost like therapy.

  Although he did cope better than some other 'miscarriage of justice' victims, there were serious problems. Apart from being a virtual non-person, which made it difficult to obtain social security or health-care, he felt withdrawn and isolated from other people.