"His mother was in court throughout the trial and obviously had neither knowledge nor suspicion of his paramilitary involvement. When he was sentenced his mother broke down in a state of great distress, which was clearly audible and must have been heard by her son. He did not give any indication that he was aware of it. Her pain was, for me, a reminder that the person sentenced to imprisonment is seldom the only one to suffer."
The words are those of Sir Robert Porter, who was a judge in Northern Ireland from 1978 to 1995. They come from one of a number of interviews which record the memories of those who passed through the Crumlin Road courthouse in Belfast - prisoners, court officials, lawyers, RUC men, the canteen manager and others.
Their impressions form part of the programme for Convictions, a thrilling production by the Tinderbox Company which has been one of the hits of the Belfast Festival.
The courthouse, which has seen so much anger and grief since it was built as a House of Correction in the 1840s, is dilapidated now. It was designed by Charles Lanyon, whose fine buildings include Queen's University and the Custom House in Belfast.
Its graceful plasterwork is crumbling and the symbols of power have, for the most part, been stripped away. But it is impossible to walk through its echoing rooms without a shiver, remembering the grim stories that unfolded over the past 30 years, and how they still haunt so many lives.
Some people think the courthouse should be pulled down and replaced with a shopping mall or an entertainment complex to wipe out the past. Others, like architect Dawson Stelfox, believe passionately that the building and its painful memories should be preserved in a way that will help both communities in Belfast.
The challenge is to repossess it in a way that gives due recognition to its painful history but allows the building to become a vital part of the city's future as well as its past.
As part of this project, the Tinderbox company has commissioned seven short plays, each lasting about 10 minutes, by some of Northern Ireland's finest writers. These are staged in different parts of the building - the courts themselves, a jury room, the holding cells to which the prisoners were brought by underground tunnel from the jail across the road, a judge's official room and so on.
The audience, divided into manageable groups, moves from place to place, becoming ever more conscious of the graffiti in the cells, the dank smell in the basement corridors. Some of the pieces have a black humour. In Court No 2, Marie Jones's characters discuss the problems of creating a heritage centre that is absolutely neutral and yet has the power to inspire useful discussion among schoolchildren.
Damien Gorman's judge launches a Troubles Opera Trust, to help create "a kind of Wagnerian Riverdance" to commemorate the Troubles. We laugh that we may not weep.
The mood darkens with Gary Mitchell's account of the relationship between a young prisoner, full of surface swagger, and a prison officer who has seen it all before and knows it will probably end in tears. In Martin Lynch's high-octane piece, the ghost of one of the last men hanged in the courthouse rages at the audience for allowing a society in which the rich always get to sit in judgment on the poor.
The evening provides powerful drama but the building itself is one of the stars. One glances at a piece of graffito and wonders who scratched it. On the night that I went I was extremely fortunate to find in my group Deric Henderson, the Press Association's editor in Belfast. As a young reporter, Deric covered the most horrifying trials that happened here - the Shankill Butchers, the Miami Showband murders, McGurk's bar.
He described being at one of the supergrass trials, when it was not uncommon to have more than 30 defendants in court. The judge wore a bullet-proof vest and was guarded by RUC men armed with Uzi sub-machine guns.
Some of the terror and the pity of those days are conveyed in the words of those who lived through them. An IRA prisoner speaks of having steeled herself to face a long time in jail but of how she will never forget her father's expression when the judge sentenced her to 22 years.
A UVF man describes "the loneliest walk ever" from the court along the underground tunnel to the Crumlin Road jail. A woman recalls the man who murdered her husband looking at her as she gave evidence at his trial. An RUC officer remembers how harrowing it could be when strong men, apparently defiant, finally understood "what was going to happen to them over the next long number of years". At the moment it seems that the peace process is once again in difficulties; we all need to be reminded of what is at stake. What happened in this building is part of the terrible shared history of the past 30 years. Some of the men and women who played a crucial part in bringing the violence to an end stood trial here and were sentenced for their crimes. They know, better than anyone else, there can be no going back.
Sooner or later both communities are going to have to find a way of dealing with the legacy of grief and suspicion but that can only happen when they know peace is secure. Dawson Stelfox is right to emphasise the part a building like the Crumlin Road courthouse could play in helping "to liberate both communities from the traumas of the past". This fine evening by the Tinderbox company shows how this might be done.