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August 7, 2025

so many stories

memories and ruminations at 3am.

It’s 3am on a weekday and the sensible thing to do would be to go to bed, so I can wake up at a reasonable time and get to work like a responsible adult with deadlines.

But night-time is when the ADHD brain gremlins come out to play, so of course, as the clock ticked over past midnight, that was when I decided that it was time to start organising all my notes on Notion so I can go back to using it again. Before today, it’d been months since I last thought about using Notion as a tool for note-taking.

I deleted a whole chunk of old pages and notes so I could start over as cleanly as possible—they would have annoyed me and put me off the whole undertaking otherwise. Then I started tidying the various references I’d added or uploaded before; most of them were court judgments or other documents related to the death row cases I or TJC had worked on before. So I created pages for each individual prisoner, linking relevant documents and articles to so I could have a tidy, unified repository of information for each person.

Then, before I could really think about what I was doing, I was writing quick paragraphs about each prisoner; the things I remember about them, their family and their case. How long I’d known this sister, drifting in and out of touch over the years. The ripple effect of that case, touching so many more lives than anyone could have predicted. How I’d stood on a street in Australia, clutching my phone, as a brother explained, as calmly as he could, that his brother’s final act of agency would be to accept what was to come; while the family was grateful, they didn’t want me or TJC to do anything more.

It will take awhile before I’m done writing notes for every prisoner I’ve encountered over the past decade-and-a-half. And these are only short passages, quick notes, little memories. It would take me much longer if I wanted to write more comprehensive stories of each person. There are just so many stories.

I am once again reminded of the grief and trauma I’ve witnessed… and felt. As I cast my mind back to each person, each face I’ve seen in photos or in courtrooms, it feels surreal that so many of these men are dead. In my memory they are all healthy, solid, alive. Even after so many years and so much experience, my brain cannot seem to compute the fact all these lives were ended not because of illness or tragedy, but simply because the state—a system made up of fellow human beings—decided it would be so.

Earlier today I sat in the Court of Appeal for the umpteenth time and, for the first time after so many years of having befriended and worked with his sisters, saw Pannir in person. “I don’t think the purple prison uniform suits him,” his older sister Sangkari joked later. Maybe so, but it was relief and comfort and anxiety all at once to see him in the flesh, to think about how close he’d come to the gallows earlier this year and feel nervous about the precarity of the situation. He waved at his siblings, then at us. Ravi held up a copy of Death Row Literature, Pannir’s recently published poetry of collection, and gave him a thumbs up. Pannir beamed.

The Court of Appeal reserved judgment, so we have to wait awhile more for their decision. I don’t mind; the longer the wait, the longer Pannir lives. I hope the judges take their own sweet time; I hope they write that judgment one word—no, one letter—a day, and only on Mondays and Wednesdays. I hope they procrastinate as much as they want. I am willing to wait forever. Nothing makes me more patient than waiting for a death penalty-related ruling.

Apart from Pannir and his family, today I heard from two other family members of death row prisoners. One is older, in her sixties, the other just a child eldest-daughtering as hard as an eldest daughter has ever eldest daughtered. One’s son is still on death row, the other’s uncle was executed almost ten years ago. I’d held her tiny hand back then, bought her colouring books and toys to keep her occupied while her mother and grandmother met a dizzying array of lawyers and spoke in front of flashing cameras. When I visited her hometown in 2022, she gave me a little gift bag of candy that she’d put together herself. “I was very small and didn’t know much then,” she said. “But now I’m older, I know what you did for my uncle and my family.”

Both the older woman and the child are going through hard times—or perhaps the more accurate way to put it is that, for the both of them, times have never not been hard. These are the people most affected by the death penalty, the people who are vulnerable to so much more than the rest of us ever have to worry about. There is only so much I can do for them. Sometimes I comfort myself by telling myself that just being there, being a friend, means something. Other times, watching the grinding, material struggles they have to go through, it feels like it really means nothing at all.

There are so many stories in my memories, so many stories that I’ve been entrusted with. Not all of them can be told. And sometimes I don’t know if many people in my country—a “pragmatic” country that doesn’t like to forgive—would care to hear them, anyway. But, oh, what a difference it might make if only we would.

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