Actor and friend of legal charity Amicus talks to LC.N about justice and capital punishment

LC.N was recently lucky enough be invited to an event put on by the great legal charity Amicus, which provides representation to prisoners facing the death penalty in the United States. Amicus is a small legal charity that was established in 1992 in memory of a US citizen, Andrew Lee Jones, who was executed by the state of Louisiana in 1991 following an egregiously unfair trial which flouted basic judicial procedures and standards of justice. The charity’s work in helping vulnerable prisoners on death row to access legal representation and justice is clearly worthy of the highest praise from anyone who opposes capital punishment and the disenfranchisement of poverty, but we also want to bring Amicus to the particular attention of LC.N readers because much of its vital work in fighting these cases is conducted by UK law students via internships. If you’re appalled by injustice and state-sanctioned murder and want to gain the best kind of legal work experience there is – the kind that makes a difference to people – then apply for an internship with this charity.

Clearly, Amicus needs funds to continue its work and that was the reason for its charity auction at Inner Temple on 25 October. To that end, the charity invited Mark Rylance, venerated actor of stage and screen and star of the BBC series Wolf Hall, in which he plays the Tudor lawyer Thomas Cromwell, to host the event. We caught up with Rylance to talk about his involvement with Amicus and his thoughts on the subject which drives the charity in its work, readers to LC.N as they pursue careers in the legal profession and which upholds our entire system of law – our (often shared, sometimes conflicting) concepts of justice. What follows does not contain the practical information and career advice which is our main business, but this is a subject so fundamental to LC.N’s work and readers’ studies and struggles that we often take it for granted without paying it the close attention it deserves.

LC.N: Mark Rylance, it’s a pleasure to meet you. How did you get involved with Amicus?

Mark Rylance (MR): Amicus invited me to host the evening to raise funds for its interns to go to the United States and work there on the cases of people who are facing the death penalty – I am an actor, so I find it difficult to stand to the side when I feel that something is wrong and not be involved in making it better. I’m wary of seeming like a preacher or someone who comes across as thinking that I know better than other people, but I am also wary of a world where we are all encouraged just to be quiet and not say what we feel. As King Lear ends so beautifully: “We should speak what we feel, not what we ought to say” or something like that – forgive my misquote.

LC.N: Capital punishment is a highly politicised issue, but Amicus is not a campaigning or political organisation – you have said that as an actor, you are not aligned with the partisan politics of left or right…

MR: Yes, I try not to be. President Obama described this in a different way a few years back, which resonated with me. He said that the question for a leader is how to manage the space between those elements who are in love with the way things were done in the past and are trying to hold on to those ways, and those elements who want to move rapidly to what they see as new, better ways of doing things. Elements within both these groups are very frightened of each other and I think what Obama was saying seemed to be a very useful way of starting to break that log jam between left and right. However, personally I’m excited for many reasons about the arrival of Mr [Jeremy] Corbyn into a place of leadership, partly because he and I have shared a lot of campaigning issues over the 30 years that he has been in parliament and I have been living in this country.

LC.N: Does contributing to the work of organisations like Amicus and campaigning on issues that you care deeply about inform your own work?

MR: Apart from wanting to be involved in the resolution of injustices, a lot of very good stories in drama revolve around an issue of injustice and what that does to people – the perpetrators, the victims and the people around them. I like to get involved so that my storytelling in theatre, film and television has a foundation in reality. So what I get out of being involved with events like this is meeting the people involved with this work and keeping conscious of this kind of thing – people living in six by nine-foot cells, waiting to be sentenced. I think my involvement with Shakespeare, who is so keenly aware of justice and injustice, has led me to gravitate toward these issues.

People on death row are on the extreme edge of antisocial behaviours, to the extent that that it has been deemed necessary to have them locked away and eventually murdered. But all of us have behaviours which are antisocial – perhaps with our loved ones and families – so no one is immune from having to face issues which they don’t like about themselves or which other people don’t like. The question is how you change that – does punishment or the fear of punishment work? I’m not so sure.

LC.N: What do you think does work?

MR: There is an interesting idea presented in [the Shakespeare play] Measure for Measure, of a leader who has experienced a very strict regime of punishment and oppression and also a very liberal regime – as he describes at the start of the play – and neither have worked in terms of dealing with the excesses nature, appetite – innate drives among the people of his city. In that play, the leader goes out among the young men and women of the city to find out what is going on, walking barefoot, disguised as a friar in the prison cells and among the inmates of death row, and comes up with this idea of a genuine public act of mercy against all odds, which is how the play ends. It is slightly cruel, because Claudio, a character who has been sentenced to death, has to really think that he is going to be executed and Isabella, his sister, has to believe that he has been killed on the orders of Angelo [the man in charge of the city in the leader’s absence who has abused his powers, including with an attempt to coerce Isabella into sex which was only thwarted with deception]. But in spite of all that, the leader has such faith in Isabella’s character that she will carry out a public act of forgiveness of Angelo, who has wronged her, and that this will have a ripple on effect in the public square on a multitude of other wrongs which could otherwise grow from little match sticks into raging fires of wrong if the cycle of justice without mercy were to continue. That a badly wronged person’s forgiveness could inspire others to follow suit with their own grievances – I think it’s a wonderful idea that a public act of mercy could be as powerful as some people think a public act of execution is.

And to add to this, something which I didn’t know which I wonder if your readers do: I have a friend who was jogging in a city in Saudi Arabia at a certain time of day. Suddenly he found himself being corralled by men with sticks into a square, where a very drugged man was brought up onto a platform and was executed – beheaded with a sword. A shocking thing for my friend to see, but what I didn’t know was what he then told me – that to get to this position of being executed, firstly the man would have gone through an enormous amount of judicial procedure and secondly at that last moment, even as the sword is raised, it is possible for any member of the family of the victim to raise their hand and the execution will be stopped. It didn’t happen on that occasion, but I have heard of a case where an 11 year old girl, despite the rest of the family wanting the execution to proceed, raised her hand in just such a public act of mercy. From that point under Sharia law, the family of the perpetrator is then in debt to the family of the victim and there is a certain amount of money – though it is not prohibitive – that needs to be paid to settle it. But more than that, there is then a relationship, a dialogue open between the two families. Sharia law has the capacity for public mercy as well as execution – I think that it’s an interesting aspect of that system that we don’t often hear about [in the West].

LC.N: We can all certainly take a lot from the idea that forgiveness and mercy are more important aspects of justice than punishment and retribution. Mark Rylance, thanks very much for talking to us.

Article written and interview conducted by Josh Richman.