Letters - 30 October 2026
'In essentials unity, in non-essentials liberty, in all things charity.'
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Defending juries
I was so overcome with joy and gratitude to see that the Quaker Truth and Integrity Award 2026 was accorded to Defend our Juries, represented at the award-giving ceremony in Friends House by founders Trudi Warner and Tim Crosland – and, for me, one among several, the beyond-iconic Quaker activist Rajan Naidu.
The reasons for an institution rather than an individual having been chosen are wonderfully reported in a Facebook post from Britain Yearly Meeting. It has great pictures, including of my dear Friends Phil Laurie and Clive Dolphin, and other Friends I don’t personally know who presented the award. It is well worth reading, also telling about the landmark seventeenth-century lawsuit against Quakers known as Bushell’s Case, which resulted in establishing the unquestionable independence of juries.
The Courts and Tribunals Bill proposes significant restrictions on the right to trial by jury in England and Wales, including removing defendants’ right to elect for a Crown Court trial in either-way cases. [Following widespread opposition, the government has announced that it intends to abandon plans for judge-only trials for certain lower-level offences, while retaining them for lengthy and technically complex fraud and financial cases.] Hence the first action defending the rights of juries by Trudi Warner in 2023 that originated the Defend our Juries movement.
Maris Vigar
Death row
In his excellent overview of the death penalty on the Quakers in Britain website (http://www.quaker.org.uk/blog/the-death-penalty-and-the-rejection-of-humanity), Oliver Robertson provides a link listing possible actions for readers to take. In addition, Friends might wish to consider corresponding with a prisoner on death row in the US, where the inherent flaws in the death penalty have been so spectacularly on display in recent weeks.
LifeLines is an organisation that has had close Quaker support from its beginnings in the late 1980s. Operating as a charity, it links up members of the public in this country with individual prisoners.
At our conference on 17 October, LifeLines’ patron Clive Stafford Smith emphasised the vital contribution that such correspondence can make. In drawing prisoners out of their world of confinement, the correspondence has changed the lives not just of those behind bars but also those on the outside.
In the process we have discovered that death row is not populated by monsters but by people with real feelings, grappling with the enormity of what they have done, the trauma of an often deeply-troubled childhood and the challenge of surviving for years in virtual isolation.
Clive is now running a project in which students research past executions to establish which of them were unsafe. The figures suggest that something like one in eight executions have been of innocent people.
Clive also saw recent events in the US – the dreadfully-botched attempt to execute Christa Pike, and the initial decision to livestream the execution of the former army major Nidal Malik Hasan – as spectacular own goals that have aroused enormous indignation in the US. These are seminal moments hastening the demise of the death penalty, already on the retreat in the US in recent decades.
Corresponding with a prisoner provides a further recognition of the fact that we are dealing with complex human beings who were leading deeply-troubled lives before they committed what was often a single event, leading to decades of incarceration under the constant threat of execution.
LifeLines’ membership, now a little over 700, has been falling in line with the decline of the death penalty. There are, however, still nearly 2,000 prisoners on death row in the US, and LifeLines has a waiting list of sixty prisoners wanting to correspond. Details about corresponding may be found on: https://lifelines-uk.org.uk.
For me, writing to prisoners on death row for the last forty years has been one of the great inspirations in my life.
Jan Arriens
