“Every morning I wake up with the hope that maybe something very good will happen in my life today, but by the end of the evening, that hope starts getting lost,” Neha wrote in the letter. While Sabu noted, “Within these walls, we cannot love or be loved. That disturbs the equilibrium of every person here. I have been noticing this since the day I entered prison.”
These words are written by prisoners on death row and are a small part of a new online exhibition called Capital Letters, put together by Project 39A, a criminal justice initiative by NLU Delhi. During the pandemic, the lawyers of Project 39A began to correspond with their clients on death row through letters, says Maitreyi Misra, Director, Death Penalty Mitigation, Project 39A. “While earlier, our correspondence with them would be about their case only, it turned into real engagement. Partially because we needed to understand parts of their lives for our legal representation work, but it also allowed us to engage with them in non-instrumental ways.” This meant asking them questions about everything from their childhoods to what life on death row is like, from the books they have read to their hopes for their children. The exhibition features snippets from these letters – organised thematically, looking at their mental health, their experiences of custodial torture, the things they derive hope from and more.
The goal is not to take away from their crimes – the people on death row are there due to being accused or convicted of serious offenses, but to show that there is still humanity to them. “These are prisoners that we see from a specific lens – that they are horrible people and are not worthy of living in society, even within prisons, but talking to them, we saw a more human side,” says Misra. The goal is not to force anyone to change their minds but offer a different entry point to the capital punishment conversation. The project does not ask for leniency, but reading the words of the prisoners, it is hard to deny that there is humanity emanating from their words, and that humanity, like human beings, can be good, bad, and everything in between.
The experience of being on death row is so specific, and one rarely gets to hear from people who are in that situation. These letters offer a window into their lives. For instance, prisoner Sar Geelani talks about the strangeness of never knowing what time it is. “I realised that when the prison guards near my cell changed shifts, they would do an arms handover. They would count the bullets during this handover, so I would hear the bullets popping out of the magazine: ‘Tik.’ ‘Tik.’ ‘Tik.’ That sound would give me a sense of time,” he wrote. Others, like N Najib, talk about the mental health struggles they are facing: “I am controlled by a djinn called Rehmat who lives inside me, he talks to me. He gives me nightmares, makes me hit my head on the floor and do bad things that have destroyed me and my family.”
Prisoners getting an opportunity to correspond with them has become not just an individual act, but a community activity, says CP Shruthi, Senior Associate, Death Penalty Mitigation. “They’ll tell us that the moment their name is called from the jail office to say there’s a letter from your lawyer, almost everyone in jail gets excited. This is because with every letter, we also send a book,” she says. Sometimes, this book is something they have requested, and other times, their lawyers suggest one. Reading, then, becomes a communal activity. Misra recalls an incident where a prisoner sent her a short story that several prisoners collaboratively wrote.
It’s not a uniform experience either. In these letters, there is the odd message where prisoners express a sense of hope. For instance, Sar Geelani wrote, “The moment you enter the death cell, you are in pitch darkness, alone. You can’t hear anyone. You can’t even see yourself. I was scared, very scared. Then I remembered a couplet by Iqbal, which says: ‘Aghosh-e-sadaf jis ke naseebon mein nahi, who qatra-e-neesan kabhi ban na saka gauhar.' Meaning, the raindrop that never reaches the inside of shell, never gets to become a pearl. So, I told myself, I must think of this cell as the shell, and myself as the drop… so I hope that this will turn into something different. That gave me hope.” One female prisoner told her lawyers that she likes prison because she has friends there and she is away from her husband, who she does not like. “This is not representative, but there are anomalies,” Misra says.
Custodial torture is another common theme. Inmates describe various forms of it – from a pregnant mother being beaten till her baby is lost to being urinated on. Misra says that one of the most distressing things are the ways these experiences are not considered legitimate because they are coming from people on death row. “People will say, of course they will say all this, don’t get trapped by what they are saying. This kind of testimonial or epistemic injustice is at the root of frustration for many of them,” she adds.
Plus, as in life outside, inequalities get replicated in prisons. It’s common, Shruthi says, for prisoners on death row to not be allowed to have jobs in prison in some states. For lower caste inmates, they often take up informal work for upper caste prisoners, like washing their clothes or cleaning the toilets. “For women on death row, there is verbal or sometimes even sexual violence. And because there are fewer women on death row, many are kept in solitary. When men are in solitary, they’re able to talk to other men through the walls but women are often the only death row prisoners in that jail or even state.”
The exhibition is not attempting to elicit any particular response from those reading and listening to its various parts, says Misra. “The goal is to start a conversation on different terms than the ones we usually discuss capital punishment on. Whether this lens is as important is for the viewer to decide. It’s a way for people to reflect on the reality we know but forget – these are humans we have condemned, they are not unidimensional entities. Whatever people come out of it thinking is up to them, that’s not the point at all.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde