2025-01-29
35 分钟This is the Guardian.
The Guardian Archive.
Long Read.
Hello,
my name is Mark Olden
and I'm the author of how one man spent 34 years in prison After Setting Fire to a Pair of Curtains,
which was published in October 2020.
What drew me to this story was a small article which I read in Private eye magazine in 1999.
It was the shocking story of a man who at that time had spent 23 years in prison
for starting a fire in an empty church just outside Oxford.
There were no victims, there was nobody in the church.
Soon afterwards I started visiting him.
His name was David Blagden in prison and wrote about his story for the Guardian
and subsequently became quite deeply entangled in his life.
When David ran away from prison,
he kept turning up on my doorstep
and there were a series of other similar incidents through the years.
What also drew me to his story was
that his case seemed emblematic of some of the worst failures in our criminal justice system.
As his lawyer, Anita Bromley, who played a fundamental part in his story, said,