In 1998, Samuel* was arrested and falsely charged with committing a bank robbery and shooting a police officer. Following his arrest, the police took him to the station, tied him up and hung him upside down. Then, the police began beating him with clubs.

Of the initial beating he received, Samuel said: “[My] knee cap went sideways and they just keep on beating me. The beating, because it is so continuous, at times you don’t feel it. The second day, it was physical pain. It’s everywhere, pain. And so I was groaning through the night.” The police were certain that beatings would produce a confession to the crime.

The police did not stop there. They put him back in the police vehicle and drove to a nearby forest. The men reached an area heavily lined with trees and instructed Samuel to remove his clothes.

The police were then told to “go to work.” Each man cocked his pistol as Samuel was strung between two trees with his arms and feet tied together, but they didn’t shoot – they only meant to scare him before beating him with small clubs and whips. For hours, Samuel endured unspeakable physical and mental abuse, while a piece of cloth in his mouth stifled his screams. Eventually, Samuel passed out.

The vicious beatings continued for five days as the Kenyan police did everything possible to extract a confession. His battered body lay on the bare concrete floor of his jail cell. In between torture sessions, Samuel was driven from one police station to another so that his wife could never find him. He knew he was innocent; he never confessed.

The police discovered Samuel’s innocence after five days of abuse; however, they conspired with a corrupt judge to hold Samuel in prison illegally for another three and a half years. At one point, the judge of the case came to prison to collect money from him.

During this time, IJM intervened and worked closely with Samuel’s family to seek justice in his case. In December 2001, lawyers at IJM Kenya secured his acquittal and release.

Upon release, Samuel began taking courses toward a degree in social work. As part of his program, he was required to serve several months with an organization and he chose to work with IJM. He is now in his third month at IJM Kenya. His current assignment is to develop a functional community relations unit. Joseph Kibugu, Kenya OFP director, describes him as having “the energy and the wisdom needed for the job.” Samuel is tasked with communicating IJM’s mission to the public and church communities in order to strengthen the grass-roots, social demand for justice at a local level. He uses his own story of suffering as an example of the cycle of illegal detention and redemption through the law.

In a recent speech to a local church audience in Kenya, Samuel said, “I have faced so many challenges that what I want to hear are words of comfort, of forgiveness, of assurance and of hope. Therefore, I hope that even today, the message that I want to share will give you a bit of something that would make you leave this place saying, ‘I have been blessed.’”