Glenroy Sinclair, Assignment Coordinator

Jerry Parks (right) greets his friend Earl Pratt, former death-row convict who was recently released from prison on parole. - Norman Grindley/Deputy Chief Photographer

A decade after Ivan Morgan and Earl Pratt murdered his best friend, instead of thinking about taking revenge, Jerry Parks has extended the hand of forgiveness by helping Pratt to meet the criteria for release from prison on parole.

Jerry Parks says he received a vision from God to help Pratt, who at the time was facing the hangman's noose.

"I went abroad and when I came back, (it) is like God touched me and said, 'go and help him'," Parks related to The Sunday Gleaner during an exclusive interview last week.

Parks has been influential in finding a home for Pratt and providing him with the basic necessities for a fresh start in life. This includes a job, which Pratt started immediately after his release from the St. Catherine Adult Correctional Centre a week ago.

STILL Remembers murder

But Parks remembers the death of his friend as if it had happened yesterday. His friend, Everton Junior Missick, alias 'Hitchie', was killed in October 1977.

"I remember the morning I went to look at him in the shallow grave. He had on the belt that I had lent him and the same blue garbadine pants like mine. At the scene, I remember seeing several women crying and the police were there," recounted Parks.

At the time when Missick died, Parks said he and Pratt were not close friends. They were just living in the same inner-city community of Big Lane in Central Village, which sits on the outskirts of Spanish Town, St. Catherine.

"Most people were of the belief that Missick was murdered by some outsiders. It was couple days after that fingers began pointing at Pratt and Morgan," recalls the sturdily built Parks.

The Sunday Gleaner under-stands that all three - Missick, Pratt and Morgan - were members of the same gang of youths who hung out on Big Lane in the 1970s. They were one happy bunch of friends, but an internal domestic dispute escalated, claiming the life of Missick.

Pratt and Morgan were arrested and were later sentenced to be hanged. Their cases were subsequently referred to the United Kingdom Privy Council, which recommended that the sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.

The 1994 ruling became a landmark case and provided reprieve for 110 other death-row inmates in Jamaica.

Morgan eventually died of natural causes while serving time. It was while at the Spanish Town penal facility that Parks came in contact with Pratt.

"I came in contact with him while I was assisting another death-row inmate, Dennis Thompson, but Thompson was eventually hanged and so I continued to communicate with Pratt," related Parks.

Apology to family

Pratt described Parks as an arch-angel sent to earth to help him.

"A man has to be born good within himself to do what he (Parks) has done for me, because it was his bona fide (close) brethren who got killed and him never knew me at the time," says Pratt, who was released on parole a week ago.

Speaking to The Sunday Gleaner then, he expressed regret for the crime he had committed 30 years ago, and disclosed that he had apologised to Missick's relatives.

During the more than 10 years on death row, Pratt says he saw the bodies of at least 65 men being removed from the gallows.

"Each time they hang a man, they would walk past the death-row block with his body. Some of these men were my cellmates," Pratt recalled.

He added that Monday to Friday, the atmosphere was very tense on the death-row block because nobody knew who was next. Saturdays and Sundays were like vacation because there were no hangings on weekends.

"Sometimes, you and another inmate is there talking and when you see the armed guards coming, everybody get tense because you don't know who they are coming for. Then it turned out to be the same inmate that you were talking with that they took to the gallows, and the conversation between you and him is not even finished," Pratt recounted.

The most haunting memory of his 30 years in prison, was the first of three times he was taken to the condemned man's cell, next door to the gallows, to await his appoint-ment with the hangman.

They weighed him to determine how much weight to add to the gallows for him to be hanged. Then they measured him and said they were building the box in which he would be buried.

Mental survival

The inmates who took him his food told him that they were outside digging his grave.

"All the time I was there, my mind was outside in the streets, but my body was inside the prison and that was how I survived," said Pratt.

Before emerging from behind prison walls for the last time, Pratt requested that the $5,000 he received from the Parole Office, plus the $100 from prison authorities for his bus fare, be distributed among the inmates incarcerated there.