Life without Parole: Letters from Prison: Alban
Dear Alban,
I’m sorry I haven’t written sooner. Four weeks ago they moved me from prison to palliative care, though I don’t know if anyone reported it—I haven’t been following the news. The doctors confirmed stage IV pancreatic cancer. They don’t think I have more than a few weeks left.
For months I dismissed the dull ache in my belly and back as prison life—the cold, the hard bed, the terrible food. I blamed the weight loss on the same. By the time they finally diagnosed me, the cancer had spread everywhere. Pancreatic tumours are insidious that way; they hide until it’s too late. The classic signs—tummy pain, back pain, unexplained weight loss—I had them all, but I simply mistook for the symptoms of being an old man in a cage.
This letter has been months in the making, and most of it wasn’t written by my hand. The squiggly parts are mine. Everything else comes through a volunteer here who has become my scribe and, on difficult days, even helps organise my thoughts. Picking up a pen now feels like lifting a hundred kilos. The cancer fatigue is unlike ordinary tiredness—it’s a bone-deep exhaustion that no amount of rest can touch. People describe it as feeling “tired, weak, or exhausted” all at once. Some days I have to psych myself up just to move my hand. This young man has been extraordinarily patient, spending over an hour on a single paragraph sometimes, reading it back to me, adjusting words until they reflect exactly what I mean to say.
Alban, I want to thank you for the genuine effort you’ve put into researching my case, my mother, Joan—all of it. It’s a mammoth undertaking. Initially, I thought your autobiography idea was, to quote Shakespeare, much ado about nothing. But after reading your outline, I’ve revised my prognosis. Good can come of this. I’m pleased you’re coordinating with others I’ve corresponded with. First-hand sources are the gold standard of any research, and they can share the letters we exchanged.
I’ve left out some of your questions—topics that require more depth than I can muster now. What I can share is that at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1gUT3Kr3xH5sSHQP1SOwEUGYBpFTH3caw?usp=sharing you’ll find my diaries. I started them after Joan’s death and kept recording my innermost thoughts up until the day I killed her murderer. In fact, the last entry is about that action. The password to access the archive can be worked out from https://www.TakeABackup.com.
Regards,
Ky Walsh
Q: Has your opinion of the justice system changed since Joan’s murder?
Justice should be for the victim. Fairness should be for the accused. We have it backwards.
The system is rigged against the dead because they can no longer speak. It’s rigged against victims’ families because budget constraints, prison overcrowding, and taxpayer costs create pressure to show mercy to offenders rather than justice to those they’ve harmed. The accused have everything at stake—their freedom, their future—so they fight with every resource available. Meanwhile, victims and their families are left with nothing but grief and the hope that the system will remember them.
I believe in absolute fairness. No one should be convicted of a crime they didn’t commit, and the justice system must constantly improve its methods and tools to establish guilt or innocence with certainty. But here’s where I diverge from current practice: evidence should never be rejected on procedural technicalities. If evidence was obtained improperly, then open a separate case against those who violated the rules. But don’t let a murderer walk free because someone forgot to dot an ‘i’ on a warrant.
Courts already assess evidence based on quality, reliability, and probative value. Ten high-quality video feeds showing the crime in progress carry more weight than hearsay. DNA evidence matters more than a partial boot print. I propose a Global Evidentiary Scorecard that standardises this assessment. Such a tool could help justice systems work more fairly and consistently, and it would be easier to keep up-to-date than dozens of conflicting precedents.
Furthermore, for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and felony murder supported by irrefutable documentary evidence—video, audio, DNA, scientifically undisputed sources—the death penalty should be available if, and only if, the victim’s heirs unanimously request it. The state would never seek it on its own. During the pre-sentencing stage, the heirs would receive counselling to help them understand what they’re choosing and arrive at a conscious, informed decision. If they request the death penalty, the time between sentencing and execution should be short.
Cases involving insanity, diminished capacity, or crimes by juveniles would automatically remove the death penalty from consideration. Offenders would be housed in facilities equipped to care for them and protect society. A lesser sentence should never be an option unless the victim’s family specifically agree to a more lenient sentence.
I’ve been criticised that this would create a lottery system based on who the victim is, and that “an eye for an eye” doesn’t bring the victim back or reduce crime. My response? Life is not fair. If it were, children wouldn’t be living in war zones, dying of preventable diseases, or going hungry while others live in wasteful abundance. In our current court system, sentencing already varies wildly based on skin colour, wealth, and connections. As for whether execution brings closure—that should be for the victim’s family to decide, not for philosophers or bureaucrats to dictate from a distance.
When Joan was murdered, I would not have sought the death penalty. The assurances the court gave me during sentencing that her killer would remain behind bars for the rest of his life were acceptable to me. How did I feel when everything changed due to a technicality? I think you know.
I will not be here to defend my position so let me give you two stories. Think about victims and justice as you read them.
Story one: During a protest, hooligans who care nothing for the cause attack two police officers with metal pipes. It’s all on video—clear footage of three attackers beating the officers, one of them striking an officer directly in the head. One officer dies from his injuries, the other remains crippled. The attackers are identified; one of them appears in footage from other protests, throwing stones and vandalising property. He happens to be the son of a connected and influential billionaire. He gets 10 years with the possibility of probation after 7.
Story two: A 14-year-old instigates a vulnerable classmate to take her own life. The victim has a moment of doubt. The instigator makes a voice call: “Don’t chicken out, it’s too late now. Take all the pills at once, wash them down with vodka—it’s painless.” The last exchange is the instigator telling the victim to delete all the chats from her phone. Police find the instigator had bragged to others about what he was doing. His computer has searches on methods of suicide. He’s tried as a minor. Twelve years later, he’s out with a new identity. When asked, the victim’s family says their daughter was victimised three times over, and closure never came.
Was justice served?
Q: You’ve been imprisoned for a short time. What is your opinion of prisons and incarceration?
Excluding homicide and heinous crimes, if I were to design the penal system, my guiding principle would be this: these places should first attempt to reform. If that fails, they should provide a means for offenders to pay back society in a dignified manner. The entire system should be nationalised with proper oversight.
First-time offenders would enter reform centres—imagine a cross between a modest three-star hotel and a rigorous boarding school. The focus would be on reform, support, training, and education. Inmates would be employed at market rates, with most of their earnings set aside and given to them upon release. Sentencing would be additive, not reductive: those who follow the rules leave when their time is up; those who don’t have time added. A reintegration plan would exist to help them transition back into society with accumulated savings, housing assistance, and job placement.
Repeat offenders would enter institutions focused on societal payback. Currently, prisons operate at a loss, meaning taxpayers fund them while conditions deteriorate and overcrowding forces early releases—an injustice to victims. I would turn these institutions into self-sustaining enterprises. Inmates would learn marketable skills, contribute to the prison economy, and set aside money for their release. Poor behaviour would result in extended sentences. These institutions could be run profitably for everyone involved.
In a rational world, low-income people might even request time in reform centres for the opportunities they provide—education, training, room and board—in exchange for a structured environment and temporary loss of freedom. Persons leaving the reform centres might ask to stay within this community because it caters for their needs perfectly.
Q: Your mother didn’t believe in God or an afterlife. You inherited this belief from her. You’re old now and at death’s door. Has your position changed?
No.
I respect everyone’s faith and have never tried to impose my views on others.
When I look at the staggering injustice of the world—both man-made and natural—when I consider other creatures that are so similar to us, when I think about how a rock from space wiped out magnificent creatures that had dominated the planet for 200 million years, and then compare that to religions that expect me to believe I’m unique and special… it doesn’t work for me.
When I think about my own mother’s experiences or how individuals abused, tortured, and murdered others in the name of a deity, it doesn’t resonate. To this day I wonder why millions have been killed and continue to be oppressed simply because they worship a different icon or love a different way.
If there’s a god watching all this and doing nothing, I want no part of it. And if there isn’t, then at least I’ve been honest about what I see.
Q: People have accused you of being stuck on two women—your mother and Joan. Are you to blame for not moving on?
My mother and wife are simply the two who played the most critical roles—the subjects I felt comfortable discussing publicly.
I’ve always had the utmost respect for women, shaped largely by witnessing my mother’s struggles first-hand. “Call Joan” further exposed me to the hardships women face. We’re one species, yet women remain the underdogs—not through lack of intellect, but through biology and centuries of systemic oppression. Physically smaller, expected to bear children and sacrifice careers to raise them, paid less for the same work, treated as property in some cultures and financial burdens in others.
Even in the most developed countries, we have daily occurrences of violence against women—hurt, harmed, or killed for wanting to leave a relationship or for wearing the wrong clothes. The criminal who murdered my wife had destroyed another woman’s life a few years earlier. The pattern was there. No one stopped him.
I’m not up to date on current technology, but I understand video and audio can now be stored remotely—“the cloud,” I think they call it. Someone should design discreet, jewellery-like devices that record automatically and upload continuously. A woman in danger shouldn’t have to rely on a witness or survive long enough to testify. She should have an unalterable digital record that ensures her attacker faces consequences severe enough to make others think twice.
Q: If you could live your life again, what events would you change?
This question annoys me and which I’ve always refused to answer. I’ve been asked it countless times, and it’s nonsensical from almost every angle. Alban, I’m making an exception for you.
First, time travel—at least as we understand physics—isn’t possible, so the premise collapses immediately. Second, even if some “go back and fix it” mechanism existed and everyone used it, the result would be endless undoing. People would keep rewriting the conditions that led to their current lives until reality became incoherent—possibly until the only world left would be one without time-traveling meddlers.
But fine. Let me humour you with some speculative framing.
Assume the “many-worlds” interpretation: if you travelled to the past, you wouldn’t change your history. You’d create a different branch of reality—another version of the universe diverging from that moment onward. Your original world would remain intact. You wouldn’t vanish from it; you’d simply appear in a new branch where your interference becomes part of that timeline’s history.
Yes, there are obvious practical problems. How does an adult stranger appear out of nowhere with the wrong clothes, wrong accent, and knowledge he shouldn’t have without raising suspicion? But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, I could insert myself quietly enough to act.
If that were possible, I would go back to the moment my mother conceived me and prevent it. In that branch, I would never be born, and the chain of suffering that followed from my existence would never start. Meanwhile, I—as the outsider who arrived with foreknowledge—could still try to help my mother build a safer, more comfortable life in that world.
And I would do the same for Joan. I would go back and prevent the sequence of events that led to her murder.
In both cases, I’m assuming that jumping between branches wouldn’t reset my age, which rules out having the same relationships with either of them. The point wouldn’t be to recreate my life—it would be to erase two tragedies.
I hope you can appreciate the absurdity of the question. You and everyone else would still be in this original universe, unaware of any parallel timelines, asking me the same questions.
Q: You’ve known freedom and incarceration, extreme poverty and wealth. Looking back at these extremes, what are your thoughts?
Difference is the engine of life. From the biological level to the philosophical, the randomness that determines where a seed sprouts or where a human is born is part of existence. But man-made systemic inequality is not the same as natural variation.
When the top 1% owns more wealth than the bottom 90%, the situation is unacceptable. Single individuals can control public opinion, purchase political influence, and effectively control entire countries. This concentration of power threatens human agency itself.
Left unchecked, society risks devolving into modern feudalism where a handful of global elites act as puppet masters of the human race. The masses would be granted just enough—a curated “living wage”—to keep the wheels turning and maintain peace, while their deeper autonomy is systematically eroded. Through ubiquitous technology and psychological engineering, these architects of influence could colonise the mind itself, dictating thoughts, beliefs, behaviours, and actions.
If not addressed, revolutions will be the only way to reset the clock. History suggests that’s inevitable when inequality reaches a tipping point. The question is whether we’re wise enough to prevent it.
Q: “Call Joan” has recently been in the news. What are your thoughts as the husband of the founder?
It breaks my heart that the organisation my wife created has been associated with scandal. Her ideas were simple, noble, and honest. For Joan and Diane, the motivation was helping women—nothing more, nothing less.
I’ve read many stories about charity CEOs accused of fraud, embezzlement, excessive pay, and ethical breaches. It seems to be a pattern.
Here’s what I would do: Create an oversight board made up of volunteers and people who have benefited from the charity. They would vote on any major decisions. Any senior leadership role receiving a salary or bonus should be non-renewable and fixed-term. Exorbitant salaries and bonuses should not be allowed—if you’re in it for the money, you’re in it for the wrong reasons.
Everyone involved in running the charity should attend regular refreshers about its scope, origins, and mission. Trustees should meet regularly with people who’ve benefited from the charity’s work. Bring them face-to-face with what the organisation stands for and who it serves.
Trustees should be motivated primarily by the cause, not the prestige or pay-check. Helping those who use the services in a respectful and ethical way—not growth metrics or higher turnover—should be the main force driving a charity’s existence.
Joan understood that. I hope whoever is running “Call Joan” never forgets it.
Read on: Life without Parole: Letters from Prison: Joan, Life without Parole: Letters from Prison: Maureen
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