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.
Matthew Goldberg, 28. Melbourne, criminal lawyer, President of Reprieve Australia
At the end of 2008 I finished university and went to Louisiana to volunteer at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Centre. I was based in New Orleans and it was an extraordinary time, it was recently post-Katrina so there was still some uncertainty about the extent to which the city would recover.
In the office I was dealing almost exclusively with preparation for a motion for new trial that was to follow the original trial where there had been a sentence of death imposed. Our office had gained access to all the trial counsel's documents and materials relevant to that trial in order to assess them and make a decision about the capacity for a new trial.
My immediate role was to put it all in a form that the attorneys could work from. There were thousands of pages of trial documents and I was to sift through the labyrinth. That can be difficult, slow and a challenge to maintain the momentum but being alongside the attorney who was managing the application made it easy to keep working hard. An aspect of the role was travel to local parish courts – in particular the parish court where the trial had been conducted to be sure that all documentation from the court files had been retrieved.
At the conclusion of my placement I had made it through the maze of documents and could present them in a form from which the motion for new trial could be settled and filed. I believe that case has now entered a latter appellate stage.
While volunteering I also met with people who were presently on death row in Louisiana and Mississippi. The welfare visits were to ensure that clients were supported and also so that the attorneys were well informed of their present condition.
Overwhelmingly it's impossible to be in that environment (death row) and not to be so troubled by the nature of it, sitting there, in conversation with someone while you both know that death hangs so near. It's really very affecting. It wasn't about anxiety or some worry that we couldn't converse but about that status imposed by the state that is brought to bear on that exchange.
There wasn't anyone I met who had just recently been sentenced. They had many years in the system and they had acclimatised to whatever extent they could be. It's just a desperate, horrible scenario – for years to be in that limbo it must horrendous and yet inevitably there's an instinct for self-preservation. All those people found some way to manage in a cruel environment.
I expected that doing an internship would be challenging and rewarding. It was. There is fulfilment that comes from working on the ground and assisting local lawyers who are helping people who are in an otherwise desperate situation.
When I returned to Australia I couldn't leave it at that.
I joined the Reprieve Australia Executive Committee to ensure that the lawyers in the US would continue to be supported by volunteers. Having been there assisting in that work, even for a relatively short time, I felt an obligation to promote and maintain the volunteer programme. There is an opportunity to bring about a change to the legal position that I couldn't ignore.
In 2011 I was appointed President of Reprieve Australia and we began to explore opportunities to expand the work of our volunteers to other countries in our local region. We anticipated that the same measure of assistance that we have provided to US attorneys could flow to local lawyers in South East Asia. After much preparation we have now established positive working relationships with lawyers in Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand. This year our first volunteers have been placed with local lawyers in those countries to assist in the defence of people who are the subject of death penalty proceedings.
I have also co-founded the Mercy Campaign which supports and promotes the clemency application of two Australians on death row, Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran. We continue to ask that the Australian Government does all that it can to keep the two young men from death.
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