My first trial was set for between four and six weeks in the winter months of May and June in 2006. After two years of remand imprisonment, I was finally going to have my day in court.
Generally, Sydney court proceedings start at 10am and end at 4pm. There is a half-hour morning tea break at 11am, and lunch from 12.30pm to 1.30pm. That leaves roughly four-and-a-half hours of actual daily court time from Monday to Friday. Not very demanding, unless you are a remand inmate going to trial from prison – those hours in court are only a small fraction of your day, and only part of the ordeal.
Different prisons have different procedures and schedules for inmates attending court. I was still remanded at the MRRC during the first trial. At the MRRC, inmates going to court are taken from their cells between 6.15am and 6.30am. From there, you go through a reverse of the process that happens when entering the jail. Firstly, you are locked into the holding cells (the same ones where I stood holding my linen pillowcase that first day). My OCD, full-blown by this time, did not allow me sit down on the concrete slabs. The concrete cell is covered from above, but the ceiling-to-floor bars across one wall and on the window do nothing to keep out the winter cold.
You wait in that holding cell, which does not have a toilet, for around an hour. Starting at around 7.30am, inmates are taken in batches from the holding cells to the processing area for the mandatory strip search. If you have them, you change into your court clothes. From there, you are placed into the outer holding cells, where I was stuck for hours on the first day after a couple of my fellow prisoners decided to call a screw names. At this point, all legal material, including any confidential material you intend to use in court and notes between your legal team and yourself, is taken from you and placed just outside the cell.
MRRC is the central point where inmates from all the different prisons going to any court in the Sydney area that day are rallied; this equates to about 150 inmates. They are held in about 15 holding cells of varying sizes. Three of these cells have a door-less toilet cubicle, while the others just have a toilet bowl and a low ‘privacy wall’, which really is a misnomer in those crowded conditions. Pissing becomes a spectator sport and ‘shy bladder’ sufferers do exactly that – suffer.
Inmates wait in these crowded cells till about 9am. At this point, each prison truck crew, comprised of two screws, is allocated courts to go to and a list of the inmates they have to transport there. With their list, they call out your name from outside the cells, and you reply with your MIN number and date of birth. After matching the photo they have of you with your face, they ask you to put your hands through the slot in the door, and you are handcuffed. When they have handcuffed all the inmates allocated to their truck, the door is opened and the inmates are led out in a line into the car park and to the assigned truck.
The transporting screws will now be in possession of all the legal material that the inmate needs for his day in court. The items are returned to the inmate 10 to 15 minutes after he has been placed in the holding cells in the court complex. The same thing happens after court proceedings are finished for the day and the inmate is put on a truck to be taken back to prison – all legal material is taken from him and placed out of sight until he arrives back in prison. Sometimes the return transfer takes four to five hours, and you have no idea who has your legal papers, or what is being done with them.
If you have been to the Sydney CBD (where there are at least five separate court complexes) and were surprised to see so many of what looked like meat trucks, but with tiny windows in the storage area, you have actually seen prison trucks.
Prison trucks are horrible.
The standard truck has a cabin for the two screws operating it, and four separate steel compartment boxes for inmates. The front compartment directly behind the screws’ cabin has a single bench across its width to seat up to five inmates abreast, facing the front. There is perhaps a foot of space between the edge of the bench and the steel front of the compartment. The middle compartment is the largest – it contains two benches facing each other, with about two feet of space between the benches. Up to ten inmates can be made to share this compartment. At the back of the truck are two identical compartments side by side. Each of these can seat up to two inmates facing the rear of the truck, and are typically used for holding protection inmates. None of these inmate holding cages have ever been cleaned as far as anyone can tell.
When I used ‘abreast’ in my description above, I really meant that every other inmate on a bench has to perch on the edge of the bench so that everyone can fit. The benches used to be upholstered, but now have been replaced with smooth, bare steel – which sends everyone flying to one side at every turn, and freezes your ass in winter. The latter situation is exacerbated by the fact that screws driving the trucks have the sadistic habit of switching the air-con on at full blast in winter time. When asked if they could turn it down, they claim that the air-con is ‘stuck’. Strangely enough, in summer time, the air-cons somehow always became ‘stuck’ in the ‘off position. The other hilarious game the screws play is to turn the radio up to maximum volume to the point that all you hear is deafening crackling from the busted speakers.
Six-inch high rectangular slots, each about a foot wide, on the sides of the compartments serve as windows. Across each slot is a row of vertical metal bars sandwiched between two thick slabs of tempered one-way glass. These windows are in line with the bench seats, but are placed so high up that you would have to be over seven-feet tall to be able to see out of them while seated. The only way for people of normal height to glimpse the world outside the dirty metal cage is to stand with your feet planted on the floor, back braced against the back of the compartment with the seat of your pants a foot above the bench.
I remember when I was being transported from Lithgow C.C. to MRRC for my first appeal, I stood braced like that for hours to look out the window into the world flying by that I had not laid eyes on for almost two-and-a-half years. I think I had a smile on my face the entire time despite the cramp in my legs.
A common scene inside a prison truck compartment is that of the inmates in ‘window seats’ standing in that awkward position, peering out while others ask them to call out if they see any beautiful girls. If a suitably beautiful girl is seen, the ‘spotter’ calls out, prompting a little stampede as three or four people rush over to try and look out of that tiny slot at once. Window seats are highly desirable, and can even become one of the innumerable causes behind scuffles between the handcuffed inmates; hands with interlaced fingers and wrists covered in sharp-edged steel cuffs are an effective clubbing weapon.
This is what you face every court day before you even sit down in front of the jury. The defendant is mentally and physically exhausted even before he gets to trial. To top it off, there would occasionally be no lunch for me because no vegetarian meals had been ordered, and I would be forced to go 14 hours without solid food. Simply concentrating on the proceedings became a Herculean task. Then, after the draining experience of being tried for murder, it was time to get back on the truck for the trip back to jail.
The Central Local Court, where several ‘mention’ hearings and my committal was held, has holding cells that are only partly covered by ceiling. The bare concrete cells are freezing in winter, and even worse when it rains.
All I wanted at the conclusion of every court day was to get back to my cell, review the day’s proceedings and prepare for the next day of court.
Perhaps you might think that it’s absurd to want to return to a prison cell. Or that it would actually be convenient to use the opportunity to catch up on sleep on the long ride back.
This is not quite the case, when you are sliding around a cramped, stuffy, metal box with nine other guys for hours as the radio blares static, someone gets motion sickness in one corner and two guys decide they can’t hold back their piss any longer.
At least in the morning, the screws are required by law to get you to court by 10am. It is a different case on the trip back to jail after court is over – inmates call it the evening ‘merry-go-round’. There is a tendency for the screws to drive around using the most circuitous routes to get from one point to another, presumably to get overtime pay. Sometimes the transfer back takes four to five hours, as the truck drops off different inmates at different locations. A dropoff should take about five to ten minutes, but sometimes you are left in the airless, dark compartment for an hour as the screws chat and laugh and have coffee in the office.
I described the early morning routine during my first trial when I was housed at the MRRC. During my second trial, I was housed at Parklea C.C. This meant that I would have to be transported to MRRC before I would be taken to court.
Almost every day of the over five weeks of my second trial, I was woken at 4.15am; on the remaining days, I was woken at 4am. I used to think that getting back to my cell at 8pm during my first trial was bad – now I had to get used to never returning before 10pm. Twice, I returned after midnight… and had to wake up less than four hours later for another gruelling day of court and court transfers.
Going to court from jail, day after day, week after week, in those conditions, coupled with the stress of trial, makes you want to get it all over and done with. I heard from other inmates that it was a deliberate ploy to stack the odds in the state’s favour by breaking the defendant’s will and capacity to fight. Personal experience leaves me inclined to agree.
There is another rather dark and gravely suspicious side to the entire transfer procedure.
Midway through my second trial, after I was placed on the truck to be transported back to jail, all my legal material went missing – it disappeared right off the truck. I had handed the paperwork – including all the questions I wanted asked of witnesses, notes and testimony-related discussions between myself and my lawyers – to the escorting screws, like every other day, before I was placed in a truck to be taken back to jail. When we arrived and I got off the truck and asked for it to be returned, I was informed that my legal material was ‘not locatable’.
I was outraged – the same thing had happened when I had gone to court for a hearing after my Committal. Then, all my documents relating to the proceedings, notes to and from my lawyers, strategies we had discussed and even part of my Brief of Evidence (BoE) had disappeared from the truck, and I never saw them again. My complaints were met with an impotent ‘items cannot be located’ from the authorities. Despite my outrage at having the same thing happen again, all I could do was put in a ‘Request Form’ at jail, asking for the paperwork to be located, and complain to my lawyers. This time, nothing happened for several days and then, late one evening after I had been locked into my cell following another day at court, someone slid my papers into my cell from under the door. I ran to the door and asked who it was after the receding footsteps. There was no reply.
This procedure of handling defendants’ legal material is severely flawed – legal notes made by anyone fighting a case should not be taken out of his sight and placed in the custody of screws or anyone else who is part of ‘The System’. It is simply another brick stacked against the inmate fighting the limitless resources of the State.