After 50 years, he finally tastes freedom and justice

HIPAUWA, SRI LANKA —  Age may have slowed him, but P.P. James wakes up early every day to head into the fields and harvest rice.

The short, wiry 84-year-old pulls a worn red baseball cap over his tousled gray hair, hikes up his sarong and, with quiet determination, swings his scythe through the stalks, methodically cutting his way across the field. While those far younger rest in the shade, he plods on, insistent that no more time be wasted -- he has already had half a century stolen from him.

Arrested for killing his father late one night in 1958, James was ruled mentally ill by a judge, sent to an asylum for the criminally insane -- and forgotten.

Decades after his doctors pronounced him cured, he remained trapped in a criminal justice nightmare. The hospital could release him only to prison authorities, who could pick him up only under a court order. The courts never called for him because they couldn’t find his file.

Most of his relatives abandoned him, believing he was crazy.

James never stood trial, never even had a bail hearing, yet he spent 50 years of his life a prisoner.

He was saved by an illness, set free into a world he barely recognized.

James has become a hero on the Indian Ocean island of Sri Lanka, and his ordeal a source of deep embarrassment over the bloated, inefficient bureaucracies it has revealed.

President Mahinda Rajapaksa gave him $5,000 to make up for his troubles, but a psychiatrist at the asylum where James was held says others are trapped in the same legal limbo, including one man who has been there even longer than James.

Longing for some of his lost years, James wishes he had been convicted of murdering his father. At least then, he would have been freed after 15 or 20 years in prison.

But a conviction would have been unlikely.

His father was still alive.

Bountiful youth

As a child in Hipauwa, a village 55 miles east of Colombo, James seemed destined for a blessed life.

His grandfather was the local government representative, giving him far greater wealth, power and land than his neighbors. James remembers harvests so bountiful that his grandfather needed elephants to haul in the rice.

James expected to inherit much of his family’s land and live a comfortable life tending his fields.

An errant coconut changed all that when he was 12.

He says the falling fruit hit his head so hard that his nose bled for a week. It hurt to speak, he was plagued by headaches and became forgetful.

He began acting erratically and would disappear for months at a time.

At 15, he joined the railroad and got the tattoos of a mermaid and a cobra coiled around a dagger that still adorn his arms. But he quit after a few months and says he became a Buddhist monk, but left the temple after a close call with a wild elephant.

Sometimes, he says, he would go into a trance and start walking, for hours or even days. He once hiked to Sri Lanka’s northernmost village, Point Pedro, a rugged trek of more than 140 miles.

At 18 he lost his beloved grandfather. The death plunged him into despair.

His relatives came to think of him as a madman. They tried to marry him off to a disgraced cousin, but he refused. The spurned woman’s parents never forgave him.

James’ mother ran away when he was a child, and his father was a notorious drinker and moonshiner who, after remarrying, shunned his old family.

One night in 1958, James, 34, walked past his father’s house and thought he saw blood on the grass. He says he looked up and saw a man, presumably a customer of his father’s coconut and honey liquor, flashing a knife.

Fearing his father had been stabbed, he ran to the nearest home -- which belonged to the father of the spurned daughter -- and alerted the police, but the officers did not find any blood. The father, still bitter over the failed marriage attempt, told police that James was insane. The officers beat James and arrested him, James said.

The details of what happened next are lost to hazy memories and the mists of time. James’ father really had been stabbed by an unknown assailant, but police accused James of doing it and didn’t wait to see if anyone had actually died.

Before James could even be charged, a judge ruled him mentally ill and sent him for treatment to Angoda Hospital in Colombo.

He would not emerge for 50 years.

Tough persona

The criminals in his ward were so violent that some had to be chained to their beds, James said. To avoid attack, James became a hunter, beating up inmates just to look tough.

He was given injections, pills and electroshock therapy, he says, and spent his days eating, playing board games and sleeping off the effects of the medication.

After a few years, the doctors said James was better and moved him to a less harsh ward with other recovered patients.

He began working, weaving chairs, then scaling fish in the kitchen, tending the hospital’s vegetable garden and rice paddies.

His only visitors over the years were his uncle and another relative. He says they began questioning why he hadn’t been freed. Hospital officials said they needed prison authorities to collect him, and the prison system said it needed a request from the court. The court appeared to have lost the case file.

His father, perhaps the only one who might have cleared up the confusion, never came. He died in 1981, 23 years after James’ arrest for his murder. The uncle who occasionally visited died 15 years ago.

Dr. Neil Fernando, a psychiatrist who inherited James’ case at the hospital, said the patient had recovered long ago and the courts were informed but never replied.

There are at least half a dozen other patients at the hospital’s criminal ward in the same situation, Fernando said, including one who has spent 55 years in the asylum though he recovered decades ago.

“This is part and parcel of our system here, not only in the legal side but on the civilian side as well, patients who have been brought in and forgotten about,” he said.

As the years passed, James grew to accept his fate: He would never again be free.

Then, late last year, he contracted an eye ailment. Decades after disappearing into a legal black hole, he suddenly reappeared in the justice system.

Prison officials were forced to transfer him to another hospital for treatment and began questioning who this prisoner was. He was given a date for his long-delayed day in court and assigned lawyers.

His legal team discovered his old case file, but it contained only two documents -- the court order sending him to the asylum and a 30-year-old doctor’s report saying he was cured, said lawyer Rohan Premaratne. There was no police report explaining his arrest and none of the nearly 600 monthly status reports the hospital should have filed.

One day a prison guard overheard James telling his story to fellow inmates. The guard turned out to be the son of the man who had accompanied James’ uncle on his visits.

The guard relayed the story to other stunned relatives.

“We had never heard of him,” said P.P. Jayawardane, his uncle’s son.

In a show of support, his family came to his bail hearing, bringing James’ father’s death certificate. James was released on bail in January and moved in with Jayawardane, in Hipauwa, his boyhood village.

A month later, 50 years after his arrest, his case was dismissed.

James was finally free.

Changed world

In Hipauwa, the footpaths are now roads. The 100 houses of mud walls and thatch roofs have grown to 350 homes of brick and concrete. Villagers who once rode oxcarts now have cars and motorcycles.

Everyone has cellphones, which James, barely familiar with the invention, refers to as “calls.” He says he is not too shocked by the changes; he watched the world evolving on the hospital’s TV.

With its farmers, grazing cows and palm orchards bordered by overgrown forests, the village still feels familiar. But now it is filled with loss.

Nearly everyone James knew has died. His uncle’s house, where he spent so many years, has been abandoned.

Soon after his release, James visited his land -- his rice paddies, coconut groves and a patch of forest filled with valuable timber -- and discovered it had been stolen by his extended family, who forged his name and sold it off, he said.

His dream of working his own fields was over.

So he obsesses over Jayawardane’s paddies instead.

After a morning of harvesting, he watches the sky turn gray and frets about the rice stalks lying in the field to dry.

“It’s a shame that the rain comes down just on the day we harvest,” he says. His cousin laughs and tells him not to worry.

Craving privacy after years in a dorm, he has moved into a mud and thatch hut behind Jayawardane’s house as he waits for a small two-room brick cottage to be completed.

Now he is famous in his village and admired throughout the country. For now, he just wants to spend his last years in peace, working the fields, this time as a free man.

He says he is not bitter, that half a century in jail was simply his fate. He doesn’t blame the government, the hospital or even his father for his ordeal. In the end, he says, he has only himself to blame.

“I should have fought harder to get myself out,” he said.