The Justice Game

by Geoffrey Robertson

  ‘We hear the flying of the trap – we hear it distinctly,’ Michael told me, with emphasis. The rest is not silence: on death row the screaming rage begins again, at the loss of a fellow inmate whose body the meanwhile twists slowly to and fro, suspended through the open trapdoor. Around it, the official party has tea and a cooked breakfast for a macabre sixty minutes, at the end of which the body will be cut down and taken to the prison hospital for a last, secret, degradation – an orderly will slash the wrists and the tendons of the feet. Nobody quite knows why. The prison chaplain told me it was a local ritual symbolic of the ‘quartering’ which took place in the olden days of ‘hanging, drawing, and quartering’. By this time a black flag has been hoist atop the prison gates. The body must be hastily buried in the prison grounds and the law is very particular about this: on no account may it be handed over to the family for burial. The reason lies in the British obsession with keeping awkward facts secret: the practice was insisted upon by an official commission when it realised that ‘hanging . . . leaves the body with the neck elongated’. In Jamaica, they had found a more pragmatic reason for burying all their executed felons in the kitchen garden at St Catherine’s Prison – it made the vegetables grow. (The former practice of communal burial in quicklime was discontinued throughout the Empire after the First World War: it had meant that when the British government returned the remains of Sir Roger Casement from Pentonville graveyard for a hero’s burial in Dublin, many of the bones belonged to Dr Crippen.)

  Michael discussed all this, softly and carefully, as if an observer at his own ritual slaughter. A paranoid schizophrenic trait, but as R D Laing might point out, who would not be paranoid in these circumstances? His brow was furrowed, there was fear and pleading in his eyes. There must, I thought, have been fear in Joe Skerritt’s eyes, too, when this man hacked at him with a cutlass. Afterwards, when Michael X ran from arrest into the jungle of Guyana, he might justifiably have been felled with all his sins upon him. He was now a different man: four years on, the man whom the State of Trinidad planned to kill was not the same man who with angry calculation had killed another.

  He now cared about others, for a start. He explained the obscene rituals of death row, and in return I explained to him how the law as I understood it applied to these facts. Trinidad has a constitution, bequeathed by the British on its independence, which protects its citizens against the infliction of ‘cruel or inhuman treatment or punishment’. It also preserved the death penalty, but said nothing about how it should be carried out. It was obvious, at least obvious to me while standing on death row, that any significant period of time spent here was the cruellest of punishments. It follows that if a State is to inflict capital punishment without unnecessary cruelty, it must do so as speedily as possible, or else abandon its efforts. Michael heard me extemporise this constitutional theory and then put a finger to his lips. ‘Stop and listen. Just listen. This place is always full of noise. But listen now . . .’ When I stopped listening to the sound of my own voice, I realised there was total silence. Turning, I saw that every man in that prison was pressed against the wire of his cage, leaning towards us and straining to hear. Michael smiled, for the only time during our meeting. ‘You see – for them you represent hope. Their only hope. That’s why they are holding on to every word you say, even though they don’t understand them. But they know that if you do this case for me, it will help them. That’s why you should do it, not for me but for them. They will hang me, whatever happens.’

  When The Guardian ran a retrospective on Michael X in 1993, Darcus Howe (who had fallen out with him in the sixties) remained unforgiving: ‘He made absolutely no impact on anybody.’ He made an impact on me in December 1973, sufficient to make me devote a lot of spare time to realising the hope he had challenged me for kindling on that day. It took twenty years.

  Michael X was the token black on board the carnival float of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll which careened through Britain in the sixties. He is there, in the official portrait of that gypsy caravanserai on the cover of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Like so many on this particular bandwagon, he lacked a message that could sustain momentum after the first profiles in the Sunday papers. He was the half-caste son of a Barbadian woman and a Portuguese shop-keeper named de Freitas, who brought him up in Port of Spain, but after a spell as a seaman he jumped ship in Liverpool to graft a living in London as an ‘enforcer’ for the Notting Hill slum landlord Peter Rachman. He was not quite the ogre in these years that some of his biographers have made out: he helped to expose Rachman (which took some courage), attacked the corruption and irrelevance of high-living High Commissioners from Caribbean countries and tried to apply the ‘black power’ rhetoric from America to the conditions of the new urban ghettos of London and Birmingham. His approach was derivative, but useful nonetheless in raising the awareness of white liberals to the racial discrimination that black immigrants had been suffering in comparative silence. His name – Michael X – was not a breach of Malcolm’s copyright so much as a legitimate bequest. When Malcolm X came to Britain he met and conversed with Michael de Freitas, and invited him to stay the night with him at a Birmingham hotel. ‘My name’s Malcolm X,’ he said to the receptionist. ‘I want a room for myself, and another for my brother Michael.’ She deduced from this that Malcolm X’s brother Michael must be Michael X. He liked the look of it in the hotel register, and used it thereafter, until it was taken away at the same time as his life: the law reports remember him only as de Freitas v Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago.

  Michael gave the media what they wanted: he played the uppity nigger with a soul on ice. Filling in at the last moment for Stokely Carmichael, he addressed some wild rhetoric (‘If you ever see a white laying hands on a black woman, kill him immediately’) to a small meeting in Reading – thirty blacks and as many whites, mainly journalists hoping to make a story out of Stokely. Instead, they made one out of Michael’s ‘Bitter Attack on Whites’ (The Times). The government panicked: Home Secretary Roy Jenkins announced that the presence in Britain of American black-power leaders would not be ‘conducive to the public good’ and they would henceforth be banned: as a reprisal for standing in for Carmichael at Reading, Michael would be the first person prosecuted for the crime of ‘inciting racial hatred’ created by the Race Relations Act of 1968.

  Michael X became a martyr to the good intentions of his time. The crime, for which he served a full year in prison, was created to discourage white racists who had daubed ‘If you want a nigger for your neighbour, vote Labour’ on the hoardings during the Smethwick election campaign in 1964. It was hypocritical to use it first to deter blacks from speaking out, especially at a time when the lethal hate speech of Enoch Powell (‘I seem to see the river Tiber foaming with much blood’) escaped prosecution because of its classical allusions. On leaving prison Michael wrote heavy-handedly for the underground press, lent his name to fashionable causes (he was a signatory to The Times advertisement calling for the legalisation of cannabis) and raised enough money to found the ‘Black House’ – a black-consciousness commune in Islington. He was a hustler and a poseur: at best a provocateur who dared society to do something about its endemic racism before too many others began to talk like him and before anyone began to act the way he talked. He was, in other words, one minor reason behind the passage of the 1976 Race Relations Act and the establishment of the Commission for Racial Equality. He was hyped up by hubris (André Deutsch published his autobiography), by familiarity with the famous (John Lennon, Muhammad Ali and Dick Gregory lent their names to his projects) and by constant media attention. He came to believe he really was a leader, because the press said so, and he looked for a country to lead. The luckless prize was Trinidad, land of his birth.

  Self-government had been bestowed on Caribbean islands by Britain in the sixties, and they had not flourished under it. Trinidad had some oil wealth which it notably failed to share with its people: in 1970, the government came under s
erious attack from labour unions and suffered a rebellion in the army. The time seemed propitious for Michael to put his ‘black power’ preaching into practice so he returned in style, with some money and retinue left over from the ‘Black House’, and leased a country estate just outside Port of Spain. But his soul politics cut no ice with Trinidad’s tough Prime Minister and his hard-bitten left-wing opponents, and he signally failed to attract the country’s apolitical youth with his confused philosophy of hard manual work and Islamic ablutions. Brief visits from John Lennon and Muhammad Ali made him a curiosity, but nothing more. By 1973 his commune at Christina Gardens was in financial and intellectual distress – his power trip was going nowhere.

  What happened next is the subject of several books, none of them convincing because they mainly rely on witnesses who incriminated Michael de Freitas in order to save their own necks. I did not talk much to him about the killings at Christina Gardens – he had some criticisms of his trial, but no fresh evidence had emerged to cast real doubt upon his responsibility. He was, after all, the chief, with a few lieutenants recruited from ‘black power’ sects in the US. Their followers were some wide-eyed locals, and Gale Benson. She had stepped off the Kings Road into an adoring relationship with Hakim Jamal, a black Muslim from Boston who had hitched himself to Michael, but her father was a former Tory MP so the English press portrayed her murder as if it were an horrific warning against miscegenation. In fact, her killing defies rational explanation. The lieutenants simply dug a pit one morning, beckoned her over, stabbed her mercilessly (while she pleaded ‘What have I done to deserve this?’) and then covered her writhing body with compost. Michael and Hakim, meanwhile, were off on an alibi tour of the island. In the paranoia that descends on portentous people as they come to recognise their own irrelevance, Gale was suspected of being an MI6 agent, foiling their fantastic schemes for black liberation. She came to be blamed for their lack of success, money, and support. Her killing was both brutal and cowardly, and all the Muslim purification rituals Michael X religiously underwent could not wash her blood from his hands, even though he was miles away at the time it was shed.

  The sacrifice of Gale Benson brought no change in luck. A hanger-on named Joe Skerritt, a distant cousin of Michael’s, heard about Gale’s death and threatened to blackmail them, demanding money for not going to the police. So Skerritt met the same fate, this time at Michael’s own hands. He was lured to his grave, dug to the clay six feet below, on the pretext that they were making a run-off for the sewage. Michael produced a cutlass, and stabbed him ferociously: he died choking on his threat – ‘I go tell, I go tell’. This time, lettuce was planted above him – a fatal mistake, as it later turned out, when a policeman experienced at growing vegetables noticed the clay that had been dug out and wondered why it had been necessary to dig so deep merely for a lettuce patch. Had Michael planted trees instead, he might have eluded justice. He flew to Guyana, and was there when the bodies were discovered. He ran, quite literally, into the jungle, where he was arrested several days into a trek to Brazil.

  Brought back in chains, Michael X became the cancer that the good people of Trinidad wanted cut out of their society. The most lurid stories were published: he was a devil worshipper, an obeah man, he had drunk blood before Gale’s murder, he was plotting an armed revolution with the help of Algeria. In Britain, the News of the World headlined him as ‘Michael X – the Devil on Death Row’. The Trinidad government, sensitive to the bad image he had brought to the nation, was determined to see him hanged – its Attorney General personally prosecuted and offered immunities to associates who would testify against him. The most popular calypso at that year’s Carnival – ‘One to Hang’ – captured the Port of Spain mood. In this atmosphere, Michael felt he would not find a defender in Trinidad, so he hired the barrister from another island who had telegrammed him, ‘The best lawyer in the Caribbean is prepared to defend you. I have never lost a murder trial.’ (This part was true, because he had never appeared in one before.) It was an impossible task. Michael had no defence strategy, and did not even give evidence – a rambling statement from the dock, alleging a conspiracy to tell lies against him, did nothing to refute the charge that he had murdered Skerritt. On 21 August 1972, Michael X was found guilty of Skerritt’s murder. The judge pronounced the only sentence provided by law, that he be hanged by the neck until he was dead. He waved to the crowd outside the courthouse as he was driven to death row, but they had gathered to cheer his departure, not from the court, but from the world.

  Any prospect of preventing that departure was extinguished by the conduct of William Kunstler, the American ‘radical lawyer’ who had defended the Chicago conspirators. He turned up at the Trinidad Hilton for a press conference at which he announced that Michael’s appeal would be safe in his famous hands. Michael, he explained, was an innocent victim of an oppressive and frightened establishment, like his other clients Bobby Seale, Abbie Hoffman, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael. The trial had been unfair and he could prove it – after all, as he said, ‘I only defend those I love’. Much as I have admired the work of some ‘movement’ lawyers (notably that of the late Leonard Boudin) in defending victims of McCarthyism and Nixonism, within a system which requires defenders to fight for their clients as much in the media as in the courts, I was never able to stomach Kunstler’s egomaniacal credo. I do not, as a rule, love my clients: I serve them better by doing something more difficult, namely by suspending any personal judgment and committing a tranche of my life to establishing their presumed innocence or (if that is not possible) to explaining sympathetically the reason for their guilt. Love, in law as in life, gets in the way of sound judgment – it leads to tactical errors, to over-emotional arguments and, most dangerously, to lies.

  That was the worst feature of the ‘International Committee to Save Michael X’ which formed around Kunstler in 1973, starring Kate Millett (‘It’s the hideous combination of racism and sexism that allows these trials to happen,’ she wrote), Gloria Steinern, Leonard Cohen, Judy Collins, William Burroughs, Dick Gregory, and John and Yoko. They were well intentioned, but the publicity issued under their names was riddled with factual errors and derisively dismissed in Trinidad, where the truth did matter. The only truth which could save Michael related to the manner of his execution, not to the clouding of his responsibility for Skerritt’s death. I found Kunstler’s behaviour offensive because it was so arrogant: the white celebrity lawyer, parachuting in to tell the dumb local blacks that they could not hold a fair trial if they tried. It is a common error, made by Western lawyers who think they know all about human rights, to descend on developing countries shooting from the lip before getting the facts straight. It was Kunstler’s press conferences at the Trinidad Hilton which had convinced my Port of Spain taxi-driver that Michael was ‘one to hang’.

  By the time I arrived in Trinidad, these antics had so poisoned public opinion that there was no prospect that the ‘mercy committee’ – a group of political appointees which advises the government whether particular death sentences should be commuted – would recommend mercy for Michael. He had been convicted in August 1972; his appeal had not been dismissed until April 1973. The Privy Council turned down his application for a further appeal on 26 November 1973. At Christmas I reported to Denis Muirhead that there was a realistic constitutional argument to be made on Michael’s behalf, namely that the sixteen months he had by now spent on death row constituted inhuman punishment. There was no legal aid to make it, but Louis Blom-Cooper QC was prepared to argue for free in the Trinidad courts, especially if the hearing dates could be fixed to coincide with test cricket matches. Fortunately they could, and the money for expenses, air-fares and (always the greatest burden) paying the other side’s costs was provided by John Lennon, who donated the white piano on which he had composed some songs for Sergeant Pepper. Predictably, our motion was dismissed by the Trinidad courts, and in due course reached the Privy Council in London, where in April 1975 we made our final
bid to save Michael’s life.

  The Privy Council’s address is No. 7 Downing Street, a few doors before the house of the Prime Minister. Say the password ‘Privy Council’ to the policeman guarding the gates, and you will be ushered through them to a hall where the state of the nation’s security (black, red, or yellow alert) is posted daily on a board opposite a staircase which leads to a large antechamber where portraits of long-dead Law Lords hang sombrely from the walls. Inside, and cordoned off from rectangular rows of benches occupied by counsel, is a horseshoe-shaped green baize table around which five men in lounge suits are listening, sometimes with ill-concealed impatience, to the bewigged barrister at the centre-stage lectern. One side of the amphitheatre is taken up by rows of law books, the other has high windows overlooking Whitehall. The parade of black taxis and red buses passing Big Ben reminds the visitor that he or she is located, precisely, at the epicentre of what was once the British Empire. What is bizarre, however, is that the concentrated legal minds in this room must all imagine they are in another country. If they look out this window they must see the pitted roads and slum housing of downtown Kingston, or the open sewers of Belize, or the sheep safely grazing in a New Zealand meadow. This is a court which is jurisprudentially orbiting in space, landing one day in Antigua, another in Trinidad, the day after in Brunei. This curious institution is the final court of appeal for some sixteen independent Commonwealth countries. It decides their law (even when, as is the case with Mauritius, their law is French), it interprets their constitutions and it guarantees the human rights of their citizens – often more securely than the same judges, sitting across the road in the House of Lords, can guarantee the rights of British citizens, because Britain, unlike its former colonies, has no written constitution.