The lawyer for the two Bali Nine men still on death row says the Indonesian Supreme Court's decision to spare the life of Scott Rush has significant implications for his clients.
Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran - the so-called ringleaders of the drug smuggling plot - are awaiting the outcome of their final appeals in the hope they too will escape the firing squad.
Rush, 25, one of the youngest of the nine Australians charged over the 2005 plot, won a desperate bid for his life when his final appeal, known as a judicial review, was granted by the Supreme Court on Tuesday.
Rush's death sentence was commuted to life in prison.
Julian McMahon, the Australian lawyer for Chan and Sukumaran, said the outcome of Rush's judicial review showed the legal system was working well.
"I'm very pleased with the decision, firstly for Scott Rush, and also for the legal implications for my clients," Mr McMahon told AAP.
He said Rush's result indicated the judges had based their decision on points of law.
"His application for review was based on an in-depth analysis of the law in his case and the Supreme Court's decision shows the strength of the system," he said.
The decision to take the death sentence off the table was made by the same panel of judges that had ordered Rush's execution following an earlier appeal.
Rush was given life when he was initially convicted.
However, Tuesday's result was not as good a result as Rush and his legal team had hoped. They had requested his sentence be reduced to 15 years.
Rush had a number of visitors at Kerobokan Prison on Thursday, including his father, Lee Rush, and his Bali-based lawyer, Robert Khuana.
Rush, from Brisbane, was only 19 and on his first trip abroad when he was arrested at Ngurah Rai Airport in Bali with 1.3kg of heroin strapped to his legs and his body, underneath his clothing.
It has been acknowledged by authorities, including the Australian Federal Police, and now in the judges' appeal decision, that he was only a minor player in the 2005 plot to smuggle more than 8kg of heroin from Bali to Australia.
Chan and Sukumaran, who launched their final appeals in August last year, probably face a bigger hurdle in getting off death row, but there have been some positive signs.
In January, it emerged that the judges who presided over their judicial reviews provided a legal opinion to the Supreme Court that the sanctity of life must be considered.
As Indonesia had ratified the convention on human rights, and capital punishment was a form of human rights limitation, it should only be imposed in relation to the most serious crimes, they wrote.
"Death penalty for this moment should only be applied very selectively," the document said.
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