Sef was sent to Silverwater’s Metropolitan Remand and Reception Centre (MRRC). A relatively new jail, it held about 900 maximum-security prisoners on remand. This meant they were waiting for their day in court, when their guilt or innocence would be decided.
At first Sef was placed in protective custody. This was largely because of his size, which would make him an easy target for more hardened inmates. However, as time wore on, he was relieved of this status. He shared a cell with another inmate, and seemingly settled in well.
Life in jail has its own routine. Inmates must provide their own television sets in their cells. And contrary to what the public usually sees in movies about prisoners, they do not eat meals communally at the MRRC. Instead breakfast, lunch and dinner — in the form of an airline-style heated meal — are served to them in the cells.
That is, unless a prisoner works in the MRRC’s workshop, as Sef did. He would awaken about 6.30 am every morning, eat breakfast in his cell, then at 7.30 am start work in the workshop. He assembled headsets, the ones passengers use on planes for movie screenings, and packaged them. The working inmates broke at noon for lunch at the workshop. Work finished at 3 pm, and the prisoners were served a very early dinner in their cells at 3.30 pm. Then they were free to watch television, read or write letters. However, Sef was not allowed to use the Internet, which he seemed so fond of. Its use was strictly prohibited inside the MRRC, for obvious security reasons.
Sef began working out, beefing up his muscles. At first he got along all right with his fellow inmates, and would not have been the first at the MRRC to protest his innocence. Many were convinced by the earnest young man; after all, a lot of the MRRC’s residents had an abiding mistrust, even hatred, of police.
Sef Gonzales had been imprisoned in the MRRC for 216 days when his obvious frustration with incarceration led him to put pen to paper. A three-page letter was received by the Daily Telegraph in mid-January 2003. Dated 14 January 2003, the letter was addressed to ‘The Editor’ and signed by Sef Gonzales, inmate number 336593, with a return address of MRRC, Private Bag 144, Silverwater 1811.
The pretext for the letter was, ostensibly, a debate that was raging in the Sydney media at the time about offenders who were granted bail and then reoffended. The Telegraph had led the campaign to keep those charged with offences behind bars.
This is what Sef wrote:
Over the past weeks countless articles have been written criticising and debating over bail decisions and the current state of our legal system.
Sadly, the most basic and most fundamental artery in this complex debacle has been constantly overlooked: innocent until proven guilty. It lives in the heart of a democratic society. Too many people are ignorant of the distinction between a police arrest and a conviction. Instantly, a person is branded a criminal the moment he or she is arrested and placed behind bars.
If you decide this is acceptable, then we should farewell democracy. What will protect the average citizen? — your parent, brother, sister, friend, you, if a detective decides that you are a suspect for a case that needs to be closed.
You have to wait an eternity (this is what it feels like when you are caged like an animal in a maximum-security prison) before you have your day in court when they will finally decide whether you should have been locked up in the first place.
I concede it is extremely important to protect every person’s liberty from criminals. But again let us not forget the above distinction between a convicted criminal and a suspect.
Anyone can be accused of anything. It’s too easy. A fair society should not scapegoat. A just society should not settle for ‘guilty until proven innocent’. We must be careful not to fix a negative with a negative. It sounds like a basic, old cliché. But when things get complicated and frustrating, often the answer lies in the basics.
Perhaps the solution lies in improving the processing in the court system, NOT in politicians telling magistrates how to do their jobs just to score some election points.
Maybe we should look at a more efficient court system with a maximum set amount of days by which a defendant should immediately have his or her day in court (like in other democratic countries). This way a person won’t need to wait years for a trial date only to be found ‘not guilty’ and have irreplaceable years stolen.
Won’t this further protect society if an innocent person in custody is vindicated sooner so that the police can realise sooner that they have made a mistake and go after the perpetrators who are NOT in custody.
The bottom line is, unless a person has been fairly convicted (not just arrested), you never really know if the person you pass in the street is the actual rapist or killer that you saw reported on the news, not the suspect who was arrested yesterday. We need to be careful in jumping to conclusions and judging people rapidly and wrongly just because we need a resolution. We need an efficient system that will determine a person’s guilt sooner rather than later, but we also need to make sure we convict the right people. The system should allow judges to do their jobs swiftly.
We should focus on that and leave the judging to the people trained and paid to do it. The anticipated problem in this suggestion is that there are too many cases to process. The jails are full and congested especially during election time. Well maybe it wouldn’t reach this stage if the job was done properly in the first place — make sure that a fair system is in place before packing our jails.
Every problem has a solution. But a ‘quick fix’ popularity contest to score election points is not the solution, neither is judging when it is not our place to. If we are not careful about which step we take, this problem will become worse and in the process lose the democracy we cherish.
After signing the letter, Sef included a curious after-note: a poem about the injustice he felt had been dealt him.
18 months since I lost my family
216 days in incarceration
my alleged guilt continues to be unproven
so in the eyes of the law, I continue to be as innocent as the truth in my heart.
Surely the injustice cannot be that difficult to identify.
Whatever Sef thought could be achieved by writing this letter, it seemed to be a cry for help from someone who felt wrongly done by and powerless in their situation.
The Telegraph management decided not to publish the letter. As Sef had been charged but not yet convicted, publishing the letter could result in contempt of court if it could be shown to have the power to sway a jury’s view, whether in favour of a defendant’s innocence or guilt.
However, my boss thought that something should be done in response. I agreed, and wrote a letter to Sef, floating the possibility of another interview with him, although, after the interview-and-abduction debacle, and the story I broke on the supposed abduction afterwards, I was doubtful Sef would respond.
It was not he who contacted me as a result of my letter, but an extremely concerned solicitor from the law firm Benjamin and Khoury, which acted for Sef. Sef’s lawyer, John Clarke, seemed to be under the impression it was the Telegraph who had approached his client. Sef apparently had not informed him of the letter he had written to the editor.
Clarke’s consternation increased at hearing this piece of news. Obviously the Telegraph could publish Sef’s letter if it wished to run the gauntlet of the law, and as a result cause legal complications for his client. Clarke requested the letter not be published. I told him the Telegraph did not plan to publish the letter, but wished to have the first exclusive interview with Sef down the track — whenever his lawyers felt the time was right.
Clarke promised to do what he reasonably could, and the letter never appeared in the newspaper. Clarke had no way of knowing then that he would not be seeing the case through to the end of Sef’s trial.
The Telegraph never heard another word from Sef Gonzales.