Peter STANFORD
A man jailed for manslaughter and the mother of his victim tell Peter Stanford about the bond they have built
It was the summer of 2011, and Joan Scourfield’s 28-year-old son, James, was out in Nottingham city centre with his father, younger brother and some friends after watching the cricket, when a terrible phone call summoned her to hospital. An unprovoked attack in the street by local youngsters had culminated in James – a trainee paramedic – being felled by a single punch thrown by 19-year-old Jacob Dunne.
James only had one small bruise on his chin but a bleed on his brain meant that nine days later, his life support machine was turned off.
If any parent can begin to imagine how Joan must have felt at the moment, they might find it harder to do what she has done since. Because she has not only forgiven the man who took her son’s life, but forged some sort of relationship with him.
“I’ve grown fond of him,” Joan tells me, on a break between shifts as a nursing assistant at her local hospital in Derby, where she now lives. “I used to worry that forgiving Jacob might mean forgetting James, but forgiving Jacob doesn’t mean I think any less about losing James.”
This week, she will explain how she got to know her son’s killer in The
Punch, a series of remarkable, searingly honest programmes on BBC Radio 4 presented by Jacob himself. It chronicles the long, drawn-out and often painful process that began when he was released after Christmas in 2012 having served 13 months, plus two on tag, of a 30-month sentence for James’s manslaughter.
“At the time, my ex-husband David and I were angry and bitter,” recalls Joan. “We felt our son’s life was worth more than 13 months. What deterrent was that for youngsters who go out and get in fights? We wanted to get in touch with Jacob to hear why he hit our son, and see what type of person he was.”
Victim Support connected her with
Remedi, an organisation working in a field known as “restorative justice”, where perpetrators and victims are brought together. At first, contact with Jacob was by messages and then letters, with the team at Remedi as go-betweens and advisers.
“I was shocked when I heard Joan and David wanted to speak to me,” remembers Jacob, now 30, and a father of two small children, “but pretty quickly I came to the conclusion that the very least I could do was answer their questions.”
And that meant, he now admits, facing things that he didn’t want to face. “When they asked me why I did what I did, I really didn’t know. I had to be honest with myself – and them, the parents of the man I had punched, even if they were hard truths.
“I did it because I had been drinking all day and I wanted to show my friends, who I’d come to respect and care more for than my own family, that I was there for them if anything kicked off. I was buying into this gang culture. I felt absolutely terrible having to admit that.”
And though the pointlessness of James’s death was hard for Joan and David to hear, a dialogue between the three of them developed.
“It helped me start to understand my own actions, and to start to take responsibility for them,”
Jacob reflects. “I couldn’t run away from the truth.”
Having played truant and been excluded from school as a youngster, he had emerged with no qualifications, but – with
Joan’s encouragement – he completed his GCSEs, and went on to college to do an A-level equivalent course.
“When I was released from prison, I had this underlying belief that I wanted to change, and make something of myself, but with no n particular direction,” Jacob Jaco says. “Joan and David coming forward gave me something somethin to believe in, a reason to commit co to change rather than t thinking about it abstractly.”
When he l landed a place at Nottingha Nottingham Trent University Univers to study criminology, crimi all three of th them decided that, afte after two and a half ye years co communicating th through in intermediaries, it w was time to meet in person.
Joan describes how she had watched from afar as Jacob had distanced himself from his old friends, got down to his studies, and in those years coped with his mother’s death, all without falling back into old ways. “We
never knew at any point if he would stay with this, but he did,” she says. “He changed his whole life, even when it would have been easier to go back to all he knew rather than go forward. And now he was to start university. It felt right to meet.”
The night before they did so in 2015, at a neutral venue in Suffolk (where Joan then lived), she was convinced he wouldn’t turn up. “I thought it was going to be a lot harder for him to walk into the room than us. There were so many emotions going on.”
But he did – racked with nerves. “I couldn’t look them in the eye for the first quarter of an hour,” he says.
“We got the hard bit over first,” Joan explains. “We spoke about the night when James was killed, and how we all felt. Then we talked about James, how he was about to qualify as a paramedic, always helping family and friends, buddying underprivileged boys, doing charity runs. He would do anything for anyone.”
Her voice – until now quiet, patient, even in tone – cracks for a moment as she describes her son: “It was upsetting that day, talking to Jacob about James,” she admits. “Some of it Jacob knew already. Some of it he was taken aback by. He got upset. We got upset.” Over the course of an hour and a half in that room, however, the conversation gradually grew more relaxed. “Afterwards,” says Joan simply, “it felt like a release.”
Picking his words with great care, Jacob describes something very similar. “If these people could wish me the best, then the opinions of a potential employer or anyone else in the future who wanted to discriminate against me because of what I had done, didn’t really matter any more,” he says. “The people that I had harmed the most had judged me the least.”
What began as something very personal between Joan, David and Jacob has, over the years, gained a wider resonance, which is also explored in the radio series. “[My aim, in] meeting him was that another life wouldn’t be lost,” says Joan. “Now, with what Jacob has achieved, members of other gangs will see that they can do things differently.”
Today, Jacob and Joan live within 20 miles of each other. He works with the prison education charity, the Longford Trust, and is building a career as a broadcaster, while Joan moved to the East Midlands “to be a proper grandparent” to James’s younger brother’s growing family.
“I don’t send Jacob Christmas cards,” she says of their ongoing relationship, “but we keep in touch. If something is happening in his life, he lets me know: when he had his two children, and when he got his firstclass degree. I met his wife when Jacob and I spoke last year at a restorative justice event in London.”
She insists: “I don’t find it difficult. I haven’t done this to replace James. I’ve done it to deter other people. Jacob never meant to hurt James in that way. They throw a punch and they don’t think what might happen next.”
Most of all, she says: “I want Jacob to make something of his life. If his mother was still alive, I think she’d be so pleased.”
‘The people that I had harmed the most, judged me the least’