Letters from Ireland ease one man's isolation on death row

AMERICA:AFTER 13 years on South Carolina's death row, Joseph Gardner was due to be executed last night for the 1992 rape and murder of 25-year-old Melissa McLauchlin. The victim's father said this week that Gardner's death by lethal injection would not bring closure to her family and he did not plan to witness the execution.

After a brief pause while the supreme court considered whether death by lethal injection was in breach of the US constitutions, the death chambers are back in action in the 36 states that allow the death penalty. Eight executions are scheduled for January, six of them in Texas, and many more are planned in the months after that.

Barack Obama’s election will do nothing to help the 3,309 prisoners on death row across America; in fact, the incoming president favours extending the death penalty to the non-lethal rape of children.

For inmates on death row, the time between Thanksgiving in late November and Christmas is one of the most difficult, when their isolation is brought home most painfully. Visits and phone calls are strictly limited and many death row inmates, in common with other prisoners, value pen friends as a means of staying in touch with the outside world and as evidence that someone on the outside cares about them.

Seán Ó Riain, a former teacher who lives in Dublin, has been writing to “Ray”, a prisoner on death row somewhere in the US for several years. Ó Riain, who found his pen friend through the Rome-based Communita di Sant’Egidio (www.santegidio.org) says he didn’t start writing to Ray because he is good “but because I’m trying to be good”.

However, a selection of their correspondence called Condemned – Letters from Death Row and published by Liberties Press, shows how enriching and mutually inspiring Ó Riain’s relationship with Ray has become.

The son of crack addicts who left school after eighth grade, Ray, who is in his 20s, was sentenced to death for a killing during a robbery.

He tells Ó Riain early on that he doesn’t want to dwell too much on the misery of spending 23 hours every day in a tiny cell and he takes more delight in hearing about life in Ireland than in lamenting his own fate.

“You said you and your family went to the dramas in Mountjoy, now that’s a thought-provoking name for a prison. I’m sure it’s not that joyous there, wonder have any of the prisoners ever tried to sue for false advertising!” he writes in an early letter.

Ó Riain’s letters describe his family’s everyday events, discuss political events in the US and Ireland and sometimes include accounts of Celtic myths like that of Setanta or the Children of Lir.

Ray is always appreciative but he is entirely frank in his criticism of Ó Riain’s stories, telling him flatly if they are not interesting or if his Irish friend has failed to provide enough context.

As the letters progress, Ó Riain gently probes for more information about life on death row and Ray describes his weeks in solitary confinement for getting testy with a prison guard and talks about the gloom that descends each time one of his comrades is executed.

Interspersed among the letters is a wealth of information about the death penalty in the US, notably its disproportionate use against African-Americans and Latinos.

At its heart, however, the book is an account of a remarkable friendship between two men who appear at first to have little in common but who discover an unlikely intimacy.

By the end, Ray feels as if he knows Ireland, as when he writes about receiving two postcards from Connemara.

“Looking at them, I thought I could smell the air,” he writes.

“If I’m ever in Ireland, somebody must take me to Cork and Connemara for sure. On the pictures, it’s nothing but water across to the next mountain, or rather island. I would just like to stand in the middle of the green field or atop the bank and just scream as loud as I can and converse with the skies about whatever comes to mind at the time.”