A radio play by Kevin Fegan
The Friday Play BBC Radio 4
I invite you to take a trip to hell. Well, it is not an actual trip to hell, but rather the story of one boy's, one man's trip to hell. This is not the hell that somehow was put into the cosmic order of things by God (did God invent Hell?), in order to punish the bad people for eternity with fire, brimstone and all that sort of thing. This is the hell that humans in authority, our agents on high, our representatives, and therefore WE innocent citizens, have willfully created right here and now on earth in our dear, smug, self-satisfied, and self aggrandizing, democratic states. It is where we GOOD PEOPLE send our BAD PEOPLE.
Something clearly has to be done with people who are a danger to the rest of us. Yet that something turns out to be time and again treating them or allowing them to be treated brutally. We all know this is going on, we hear countless stories about it year after year, it's not big secret. People joke in media about how so and so who has been bad will be sent away to suffer rape inside, as if that is what they deserve for the wrongs they have done. We are not even concerned that most of these people will one day be released, set free, in a more distorted, brutalized, angry, vengeful, and dangerous condition than they were when they went in. After all they are BAD, otherwise they would not be there, would they?
With the story of Paul Blackburn we hear the horrifying quarter century saga of one who happen to fall into the hell that we made. This is the story of a young teen boy convicted for a brutal sexual assault and his time inside. He is convicted even though three others confessed to the crime, he is convicted even though the police did not at all follow legal procedural guidelines for the handling of youthful suspects. And he is released 27 years later and exonerated and with little support, cast out into an alien world of freedom to get by as best he can as a brutalized, damaged, traumatized victim of state justice.
This is not a pretty or uplifting story, but one that we have to keep hearing time and again until something is done to avoid the continuance of convictions of the innocent, and the unjust and disgusting criminal brutality of the guilty.
In Denial: The Story of Paul Blackburn, the play by Kevin Fegan. Is a very well written and produced piece. The cast with Adrian Bower, Gerard Kearns, Robert Pickavance, Glenn Cunningham gives the docudrama a rare and heartbreaking authenticity.
The atmospheric music by Andrew Diey adds much to the feel of the play without calling attention to itself.
It can be heard here through Thursday April 19, 2007:
The Friday Play BBC Radio 4
More information on the Blackburn case can he read here:
: Innocent-FIGHTING MISCARRIAGES OF JUSTICE
