Donna Mooney struggles to talk about her brother, Tommy Nicol. He died nearly a decade ago, serving a sentence which the prime minister had declared “unclear, inconsistent and uncertain” nearly four years earlier.

“I’ve got letters from the time when Tommy refers to [his sentence] as psychological torture,” Mooney tells Big Issue. That, she now feels, “was the beginning of him calling for help.”

Her voice cracks as she remembers her brother who got sent to jail and never came out.

“He just didn’t see any way out, probably because he’d spent six years trying to do what he was told to do, to get on the courses that would have helped him, and he had no control or power to move that forward.

“It tipped him over the edge, to the point where he thought the only way out was to take his own li

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