Unconscious motives

Yesterday the young man who shot 12 people in a cinema was sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of release, though some had expected the death penalty. No one has any idea why he did it—the court said it wasn’t relevant. I wasn’t interested in the verdict or his motives. It was just a news item, which on its own rang no bells in my head; until a blogging friend in America said he’d hardly met any Southern poor white trash. It was in the context of Elvis Presley, of whom he’s never been a fan—nor have I, for what it’s worth.

So I thought to myself, I’ve never met any Southern poor white trash either, in any of my visits to the States. And yet an insistent bell started to ring, a memory wanting to be let in, not perhaps of “Southern poor white trash, but certainly “trailer trash”. Perhaps movies I’ve seen. Herzog’s “Stroszek” would be one, and another about Mississippi people who live in ruined shacks, or was it in the Everglades? There were others, I get muddled. But it wasn’t any of those. It came back to me: he lived in a trailer, committed an inexplicable murder, was put on Florida’s Death Row and remains there to this day. I know this, and know him, because we corresponded for several years.

As to why he did it, or indeed why we later shared a correspondence, one can think of motives; but I can’t quite believe in them, wondering instead whether there truly is a destiny that shapes our ends.

At the time I was laid up with chronic fatigue syndrome, more or less housebound, more or less unemployed. I felt drawn to do something useful, voluntary work from home. I found a website, HumanWrites, “a long established British organisation founded for the purpose of befriending prisoners on Death Row in the USA”. If I remember rightly, there was some kind of vetting procedure, and then they arranged an introduction to the prisoner I mentioned above. And so we got to know one another. I may have his letters somewhere, and mine to him. He would have preferred writing to a woman, or failing that, letters with pictures of women embedded in them. I used to embed images just as I do now in blog posts, but they were snapshots illustrating my simple stories of daily life.

We managed to find things to talk about, while carefully avoiding the subject of his crime, which in any case he denied committing. I cannot blame him for that, as he spent much of his time pursuing appeals through a succession of assigned lawyers, who as you may imagine were inexperienced and pleaded his cause half-heartedly to practise their craft, with no passion to free him. He would describe his daily life, vividly and amusingly. Sometimes he would lightly hint that he needed money to buy stamps, and if I could afford anything beyond that, there was a whole range of things he could order from the prison canteen, from fancy foods to a small colour TV. He was able to eavesdrop TV from the neighbouring cell, but to get picture as well as sound, he held a mirror through the bars to get a reflection of the screen. This wasn’t allowed, and one day he injured his arm pulling it in when a guard showed up.

The first time he wrote he said he was a Buddhist, after receiving books from the Prison Ashram Project, a part of the Human-Kindness Foundation founded by Bo Lozoff, who has since died in 2012. He said this resource had made a difference to him. He was a pleasant, attentive, tactful and considerate correspondent; not stupid but able to look after himself and make the best of situations. He had a low opinion of some of his fellow inmates, but I don’t remember him saying anything bad about the guards, though the rules were punitively strict and it was easy to get into trouble. I never thought he was telling me the whole truth. He might have lied consistently for all I know. I could see he was pretty good at turning things to his advantage. I discovered he had posted requests for pen-pals in many places, and probably had many correspondents including women whose epistles would have pleased him a lot more than mine. I imagine him to be devoid of the kind of moral conscience that you and take for granted.

Given all this, it made no sense that he should have done this violent murder. He was intelligent enough to see that he would promptly get caught, as indeed happened. What was his true motive? As I’ve said, I never went near discussing his crimes with John himself, but it was easy to get hold of his story online. I guess that's part of the punishment. You have no privacy, either in your cell or in the world at large, where everyone can see what you’ve done. Here, for instance; and also here.

My role was not to judge his guilt, or have an opinion on the suitability of his punishment. I’m not even a principled opponent of execution. My motive for the correspondence, as I thought, was to practise kindness. For all I know he wanted to practise kindness too. Why should he not seek any form of atonement available, and send kind letters to all comers from his (monastic) cell? I prefer to think well of every fellow-creature. Our correspondence ended ten years ago. Not long before that, he had a visit from his daughter. It wasn’t easy to arrange, especially because her mother had long ceased contact and I don’t think they had ever lived together as a family. He sent me the photo above.

To me, his crime had the unconscious motive of landing him in jail for his own good. Perhaps the same goes for the young man who killed 12 in the cinema. I seem to see some people, myself included, driven to do what we do as if in obedience to pre-ordained destiny. We are as bewildered as anyone by what we do, and struggle to rationalize our actions by deducing motives after the event. If this is true, it doesn’t exonerate us from the consequences, which are perhaps pre-ordained too.

It did occur to me that someone living in John’s chaotic circumstances outside jail would not be able to pursue any deep urge to a more spiritual life. Prison offers him a retreat from the world, and a chance to behave properly as a human being. I wish him well, whatever happens, over the years to come.