The Orca Hotel, Stromness, Orkney, 24 January 2006

Kenny Richey.

“EVEN THOUGH this new evidence may establish Mr Richey’s innocence, the Ohio and United States constitution nonetheless allow him to be executed because the prosecution did not know that the scientific testimony offered at the trial was false and unreliable.”

Thus reads a quote box on the homepage of www.kennyrichey.org , the site set up in support of the Scotsman (see picture above) who has been on Death Row in Ohio since 1987.

Quite apart from the question of capital punishment – rather a clean term for the kind of electrical rage wrought on human flesh by “Old Sparky” – the case itself would seem to present little comfort in a system of justice that cherishes brutality as much as it seems skewed against those citizens it marks as brutish.

I’m not sure how many performances of Johny Burns’ ‘A Letter from Death Row’ took place on Burns Night. I’d read the weekend before it was to be five – one in Orkney, the others in London and Dublin, Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it wasn’t till that morning I heard Fiona Matheson say on the local radio that it would be given in the Orca Hotel in Stromness at 7pm, and would last for an hour.

At about 3 minutes for every year the man’s been waiting, it seemed a fair swap, and I joined the dozen or so gathered in the dining room for the reading-performance by local actors. It turned out that the choice of locations had been determined by whether or not those on Tam Dean Burn’s e-address book had expressed an interest, and I’m glad Fiona did.

The venue itself was ideal. As one neighbour said, it looked like a stage, and another, that it was like a church. As ritual, the play suited both contexts, but it was still a dining room, and that suited the sense given both by the script and by the form of presentation that here essentially were people.

One was prosecutor, one a defendant and one a defense lawyer (and another six read other parts), but beneath those roles, in particular as regards the first two, were the kinds of frailties and faults the legal system is supposed to enable us to rise beyond, but in this case it apparently did not.

A courtroom drama rarely fails, and this one worked not only because it was dealing with real events, nor just because it was well written and performed. But because the nature of the performance – which did without the usual fictions of stage set and many other kinds of theatrical pretence – brought us that much closer to the people involved.

A cast member was heard to remark later, “It was very moving to know we were speaking the words of real people,” and one could tell that.

A collection was taken as we left. I hope we give enough.

© Alistair Peebles, 2006