The 'mercy' sentence that's anything but

David Blagdon has spent 23 years in prison for setting fire to a pair of curtains ? yet he harmed no one. Now the law may finally acknowledge the injustice of his case. By Ian Herbert

It is testament to his appreciation of infinitely small mercies that David Blagdon, a 49-year-old inmate of HMP Nottingham, was happy to be granted a job in the hospital last week.

He will have set about cleaning the flagstone floor by 7am today; washing pots, and talking with patients and dishing up will probably follow until 5pm. It's mundane stuff, but Blagdon insists it beats his last £5-a-week job – packing teabags in the prison workroom. This only kept him occupied until lunchtime. Then he was back to his cell for an afternoon routine of making word-search magazines stretch until Countdown starts on Channel 4. "Anything that needs me to be on the move, out of the cell, keeping things ticking over" is his definition of job satisfaction.

Blagdon's equanimity is remarkable when you consider that Nottingham is his 16th prison and that his sentence has so far been 23 years for the crime of setting fire to the velvet curtains in an empty church.

He was handed a discretionary life sentence in 1978 – a term usually reserved for serious offenders in arson, robbery, rape and manslaughter cases, but also a judicial option for petty criminals who are unhinged and pose a public danger.

Murderers given mandatory life sentences often serve 15 years and rapists tend to get eight. Blagdon's despair at the likelihood that he will serve more than both combined reached a predictable conclusion recently when he absconded.

Three months had elapsed after the expiry of the May 2001 deadline laid down by a High Court judge for the Parole Board to reconsider his case, and with no word from the Home Office, Blagdon picked his moment on an unescorted outing from Sudbury open prison to the nearby Derbyshire town of Ashbourne.

After meeting a friend for a drink in a pub, he made for a London-bound coach. He eventually meandered back via Brighton and Oxford to a friend's house in Derby – an obvious sanctuary where officers waited to apprehend him.

Last week, his solicitor, Anita Bromley, secured assurances that the case is at last to be raised in the Commons – by the Wellingborough MP Paul Stinchcombe.

As the years behind bars have racked up, Blagdon's case has elicited minimal publicity – just two national newspaper features in the past six years to add to campaigns by the Oxford Mail and the News of the World, where efforts to free him two years ago culminated in a story last May under the headline "Curtain blaze man to go free". He didn't.

Blagdon's failure to win much sympathy may be because there was no great miscarriage of justice. In November 1978, when aged 27, and by his own admission mentally unhinged, he was sent down from the dock in courtroom one at Oxford Crown Court to serve the first two years of a discretionary life sentence in the city's prison cells below.

His fate had been sealed four months earlier, on 7 July, when he stole a lady's bicycle from outside a shop in Oxford and rode it along the A34 to the first settlement he could find: the village of South Hinksey.

He hurled a rock against the door of the church of St Laurence, and, discovering it was was not locked, stepped inside, armed with a box of matches. He set fire to the curtains, scorching a pew in the process, and as smoke wafted from the church, he waited in the graveyard for the police to arrive. He handed himself over to a policewoman. The total damage was £1,270.

The judge in the case, Mr Recorder Christopher Young, heard that Blagdon's crime had been committed against the backdrop of a disturbed childhood littered with criminal incident. Born David Davies in Guildford in 1951, he was only a few months old when his mother was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, and he was fostered by Arthur and Renee Blagdon. They lived in Leicestershire before Mr Blagdon's work took them to a council house in the village of Kingston Lisle, near Wantage, Oxfordshire. But when their youngest child died of bronchial pneumonia in infancy, Mrs Blagdon took to her bed and barely left it in 15 years. With his foster father away, David took on responsibility for her. He picked up jobs as a labourer, a gardener and an odd-job man, not to mention 13 convictions between 1965 and 1978 for burglary, assault, theft and setting fire to rubbish bins.

Blagdon was in prison, serving a sentence for his third arson offence, when he learnt that his foster mother had cancer. She died four years later, a few weeks before his foster father. It was on the day of Mrs Blagdon's funeral that her foster son took the bike to St Laurence.

After his arrest, the psychiatrists who assessed him were divided on the need for treatment, despite evidence of attempted suicide. Two said he showed no sign of mental illness but had a personality disorder. Another said he should be sent to Rampton high-security hospital. When the case came to trial, the judge was dismayed. He suggested adjourning sentencing for further medical opinion. Blagdon, craving the security prison offered, told his barrister to proceed. In 20 minutes, his liberty belonged to the past.

The law regarding discretionary life sentences was changed in 1991, allowing their imposition only if a defendant is considered a danger to the public indefinitely. But in 1978, Mr Recorder Young, viewing Blagdon as a danger but unable to detain him under the Mental Health Act, gave what was known as a "mercy" life sentence. He did so, he concluded, "with a heavy heart... because I personally wish it was otherwise."

Later that year, in a report to the Home Secretary, Merlyn Rees, the judge wrote: "In a just society, Blagdon should not be in prison at all, but in a secure place where he could be offered treatment."

In 1985, his tariff – the minimum period a prisoner must serve to fulfil the requirements of retribution and deterrence – expired. But, according to a Home Office letter, until 1993 Blagdon had "made no effort to address his offending behaviour". In August 1997, while in open conditions at HMP Leyhill in Gloucestershire and having been turned down for release by the parole board, he absconded and went to Doncaster. Using his real National Insurance number and surname (Davies), he secured an emergency loan from the DSS, stayed in a night shelter and found a job on a building site. After seven weeks, during which he posed no threat, he gave himself up.

The police officers who took Blagdon back to prison could not understand why he was there, he claims. At least two confidential medical reports since 1992 have concluded that he posed no threat to society.

In the visitor room at Nottingham last week, Blagdon demonstrated no more evidence of his past troubles than the faint white scars across his hands, wrists and arms. "I burnt that church because I wanted to get back into prison," he says. "Even the vicar forgives me. He says the pew needed replacing anyway."

His recent decision to abscond came in desperation, he adds. "Even when I've absconded I've been orderly. I've demonstrated how I would be outside of here." He details six years' work as a prison listener at four jails, and the toys he made for children and sold at market while at Lindholme open prison near Doncaster, as evidence of new purpose.

His lawyer has had it on the authority of senior warders at Sudbury that Blagdon's freedom may rest on him passing more of the "responsibility tests" that most murderers and rapists are put through, rather than an assessment of his how his period of confinement fits his crime. "The tests are completely inappropriate and have nothing to do with whether he was fit to be freed," she says.

She and civil-rights lawyers blame the prison system for allowing prisoners who have harmed no one (there are believed to be eight) to be confined for decades. "We want this raised as a general policy issue in the Commons, because there should be a degree of discretion for them," says Bromley.

Michael Mansfield QC says that once a person enters jail, the reasons for confinement are forgotten: "They become part of the prison culture."

Blagdon struggles to describe what fills his time these days. "Papers, magazines – I'll read anything," he says. But his aspirations for a life away from prison are more tangible. "All those things that I've been stopped from doing since I was nine. Walks by the sea. Trips to the zoo. Life with a family and a wife."