As the rest of Uganda celebrated the NRM liberation day, Ben, the Ugandan jailed for life in the US, hang his head in disappointment as his parole was denied once again, and deferred for another five years.

Benjamin Oryang was jailed for life when he was 18; he is now 38, having stayed half his life in Donaldson Correctional Facility, one of Alabama’s toughest maximum security prisons (See: Ugandan in US jail tells it all, The Observer, October 8, 2009).

Ben denies committing murder. The only crime he admits committing and regrets, was hanging around the wrong crowd even when he knew that they had killed before.

This gang of teenagers was involved in multiple drive-by shootings on December 16, 1991 that resulted in the death of a National Guard staff sergeant, Julia Lindsay, and injury of three other people.

After the incident, Ben says, they asked him to keep their gun for them and not knowing what they had done, he obliged. Later, when the Police arrested him and the gun was found in his possession, his finger prints were all over it.

Convicted of murder and sentenced to life imprisonment, Ben has been hoping that his good behaviour might help him secure parole.

His first hearing was held in August 2004. He was denied parole and deferred for five years then. The next hearing was supposed to be in August 2009, but it was delayed by the parole board.

Under the law under which Ben was sentenced, a parole hearing should have been held for him after he had served a third of his sentence, 10 years, or whichever came first.

This year (2010) marks 19 years since Ben was incarcerated. That is well over a third of his sentence. Though this hearing was for Ben to plead his case, he was not allowed to appear before the parole board in person on his own behalf.

The hearing was held hundreds of miles away from the prison where he is incarcerated, and only two or three people were permitted to speak briefly on his behalf, including his brother David.

The victim’s families were present and allowed to speak in favour of keeping him behind bars, and so were many politicians and law enforcement officials who worked to get him behind bars in the first place. Parole is usually granted to prisoners who have served at least a quarter of their prison sentence.

Before his family migrated to the US in the early 1990s, Benjamin Oryang studied at Namasagali College in Uganda, and indeed there was an outpouring of sympathy from his old boys, family and friends when this newspaper first published his story.

On December 11, 2009, Ben was abruptly transferred to another prison, St. Claire, still in Alabama. Upon arriving there, he and nine other new arrivals were held in an outdoor cage in the segregation area, in the freezing cold (temperatures that day were a few degrees below freezing and it was windy), with only the measly jackets all prisoners are provided with, for well over two hours.

Perhaps this was a warning to the incoming prisoners, including Ben, that St. Claire’s may be a lower security facility but it was still a prison.

If Ben had obtained parole this time round, he would have had to stay a couple of years in the US under the watchful eye of a people officer. Still, even if he was not coming home immediately, at least Ben would have been a free man trying to salvage the rest of what life has to offer him.

Parole is a privilege, not a right and for Ben, he still gets five more years before he can apply again. By this time, the Ugandan boy who was jailed at 18 years will be a 43-year-old man.

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