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He was good, my QC, don’t get me wrong. But I thought, he’s not me. He don’t know what I know. The problem for me was that although I know what I know, I don’t know what he knows. Do I let him speak to you in your language but telling only half the story, or do I do it myself and tell the full story with the risk that you won’t understand none of it? Can I even tell you the whole story? Would you believe it? I don’t know man. I don’t know. But what I do know is that I ain’t going to be risking my life for this murder and not tell you what is true. Even if my barrister don’t want me to do that.

So here’s my confession. I gave you evidence on oath before. On the Holy Bible. But God knows what I told you in the witness box wasn’t exactly the whole truth. It had some truths, don’t get me wrong, a lot of truths, but it also had some maybe not truths. But that is the way he wanted it, my brief. ‘It’s not about the truth,’ he says to me, ‘it’s about what they can believe.’

This upset me, I mean how can I swear to you to say the truth and then like tell you lies? So last night when I was trying to sleep I thought about it. A lot. And when I woke up I weren’t happy, trust me. So this morning I said to him, ‘Bruv, I need to start telling it like it is. This speech, my closing speech, it’s my last chance.’ And he goes, ‘Well that’s it.’ He can’t act for me no more for ethical reasons. Ethical reasons? I thought ethical was about truth, but apparently, it ain’t. It’s all about impressions. ‘What impression do you think you are giving if you go into court now and tell them a different story? What do you think it’s going to look like if you tell them this new piece of information?’ ‘Well maybe,’ I says to him, ‘I don’t need to tell them that thing’ – and truth be told I ain’t even sure if I can tell you that thing. Coz if I do tell you that thing I’m not sure I would even survive it, you get me?

Don’t get me wrong, I want to tell you but I’m just not sure if I can right now. I don’t know what you’d think about me if you heard that. Maybe you need to get to know me a bit first. The real me.

Right now you think, looking at me, that I’m just some foolish kid who go around shooting up people for no reason. I know you think that because I ain’t stupid and you ain’t stupid. I know my evidence, what I said to you from the witness box, weren’t all that good. I know that. I know it was shady. So I know what you think is that I just shoot up that kid but that ain’t it. That’s just what they want you to believe. They want you to think that I’m a no-brain lazy kid who go into some random street and shoot a next man up for nothing. Don’t be fooled though. They are good at that – fooling you. That’s what this guy, Mr Prosecutor, does for a living. He does this day in, day out, and by the time he’s finished with you, you’re seeing white as black and black as white. I take my hat off to him. He is good. He’s sneaky, but he is good. But you have to see past all this smoke he’s been creating here and see what’s behind it. Trust me you’ll be surprised. You don’t have to do it for me. Just do it as one of them things, just as an experiment. If I’m wrong, I’m wrong, and you do what you have to do. But if I’m right …

Start with the evidences. Okay the evidences don’t look good for me but there aren’t that many of them really. But before I go into all of that I just want to say this. Ignore what all I said or didn’t say in my statement when I got up there in the box the other day. That don’t matter really, does it, if there’s no real evidence to tie me to this murder? If the evidence is shit, what does it matter what I did or didn’t tell you?

Okay so here it is. This is how I wrote them down:

A boy got shot who is from the same area I live in.

Three months before he got shot someone saw me apparently walking past him and saying to him, ‘You’re waste man.’

A couple of months before he was shot a witness saw Jamil, the dead boy, having an argument with a black boy about my age wearing a black hoodie with white Chinese-style writing on the back.

Cell-site evidence. The phone expert said that my phone was in the same cell-site as the deceased at the exact moment of the shooting. My phone was also in the same cell-site as his on the day that I was supposed to be arguing with the boy. And it was also in the same cell-site as his phone on the day that I was supposed to be saying, ‘You’re waste man.’ All within one cell-site area. What did that expert say? Fifty or sixty metres?