Stubborn or Innocent?

The popular imagination has it that swathes of prisoners insist on their innocence. Not for the first time, the popular imagination is wrong.

There are innocent people in prison, enough to make those informed or caring enough to worry about our judicial system. But it isn't a majority disease.

Whenever someone tells me that they are innocent, I tend to let it wash over me. Maybe they are, maybe they're not, and either way their daily life is the same.

But rather arbitrarily, I take the view that anyone who is still protesting their innocence after ten years is either genuine or crazy.

By the ten year mark we all know that protesting innocence is a guarantee to a long, long stay in prison. It is long enough for those who initially claimed innocence as a trial ploy to come to terms with their guilt and admit it.

So if a man tells me, ten years in, he is innocent then I am likely to believe him. For what that's worth.

That said, though, there are isolated cases where a man's denial of the crime is a huge personal, emotional investment. He may have persuaded his family, his partner, his children, that he is innocent and that the trial verdict was perverse.

They stick with him, supporting him emotionally and financially, struggling to keep their lives normal whilst campaigning on his behalf.

These people, these guilty people, find themselves dug into a hole from which they cannot escape. To do so would be to risk destroying the whole edifice they have created around themselves. It would be to risk losing their family.

There are times when being genuinely guilty, like myself, is a small comfort.