In 2001 a group of young Melbourne lawyers arranged to volunteer with death row attorneys in America. The organisation they formed, Reprieve Australia, is now this country's peak anti-death penalty organisation.
More than 100 volunteers have travelled overseas to work on capital trials and appeals while Reprieve Australia agitates for abolition of the death penalty across the globe.
In an under-resourced area of the American legal system, work by volunteer Australians has made an enormous contribution to the defence of those on death row.
These are some of their stories from the coalface of the American justice system.
Anna Martin – 29, lawyer, Melbourne
I went to the US on a Reprieve internship after three years of studying criminology and psychology. I had just completed my first year of law and I was particularly eager to see how a criminal law practice worked. It was 2006 and I was placed at the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE), a death penalty advocacy office in Houston. The lawyer who ran the centre owned a house around the corner from the office which doubled as the "intern house" and I stayed there with three other interns who were also volunteering their time.
The work I completed throughout my internship was pretty run of the mill. I had to sift through boxes of files and handwritten documents relating to one particular client and transfer them onto an electronic database word for word. Essentially I was creating a searchable document which included every single word that had been written about our client throughout his entire life: from hospital birth records, to school records, to prison records. For two months, this was all I did. The result was one electronic file that contained every piece of information we had on him. For the rest of his long-running case, all the attorneys needed to was to press 'Control/F' and find what they needed almost instantly. It was an extraordinarily valuable resource, and this helped to keep me motivated.
Despite the monotony of the task, I learnt a lot about this particular client. His life, as 'officially' documented, was an extraordinarily sad one. Born into social and economic disadvantage, sexually and physically abused from an early age, difficulties at school where his intellectual disability was not recognised, he had more contact with the criminal justice system by age 18 than he had with welfare and education. His story was not dissimilar to many others on death row.
One of the defining moments of my time in Houston was when one of GRACE's clients was executed. Until that point, the work we were doing was somewhat removed from the reality of execution. It is not unusual for offenders to sit on death row for a decade, sometimes two or three, before being given the needle. Some offenders will have numerous "dates" before the execution is actually carried out. So for the first few months of my internship, there was not really a sense of urgency, rather, an overwhelming sense of the system working incredibly slowly. But as the execution date drew nearer, the sense of urgency and hopelessness increased. We stayed at the office until late, not because we were working on the case, but for moral support for those who were. As the afternoon drew to a close, there was less and less work to be done. One by one, the last minute appeals were rejected. Finally, the fax machine churned out the Governor's refusal to stay the execution and just like that, it was over. I couldn't help but imagine what was happening in the death chamber immediately thereafter. The same thing happens about once every three weeks in Texas.
My attitude to the death penalty is the same as my attitude to criminal justice and sentencing in general: we should always respond to crime in a humane way, with a consideration of factors beyond punishment. Our criminal justice system should be measured by reference to the way we treat the worst offenders. Killing them is not only inhumane, it is also giving up on an offender's ability to contribute anything positive to society and often, in my experience, it completely disregards all the social, economic and intellectual factors which led to the offender committing the crime. These are factors that we, as a society, can curb with a bit of effort.
In criminal justice, we talk about mitigating circumstances that, to some extent, reduce the culpability of the offender. In Texas, these circumstances included a family environment consisting of physical and sexual violence; a considerable lack of education; mental illness and /or intellectual disability; racial bias; and poverty among other things. Often, all of these factors were found in one case. In my opinion, we should not, as a society, be focusing on killing someone for mistakes they have made, no matter how heinous, but rather, we should focus on fixing the social conditions which led to them committing that crime. That is good policy.
The hardest part about my internship was leaving. After spending close to every waking minute working on one case, to just get up and leave to go back to uni was quite difficult. But it did give me motivation to study further, complete my law degree, and become more interested in policy not just legal practice. That interest has shaped my career so far and has landed me in an area of a corporate law firm doing quite a lot of work for the Department of Justice. I have also been involved with Reprieve in one way or another since 2006 holding positions of Executive Officer, Volunteer Coordinator, and currently Intern Coordinator and Vice President. I intend to return to GRACE at some stage in the future.
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