WORDS Thomas Russo

‘Bali 9’ lawyer says justice isn’t served by killing offenders.

There’s nothing ambiguous about Melbourne lawyer Julian McMahon’s stance on the death penalty.

‘In my opinion, state sanctioned killing demeans a community, destroys respect for human life generally, and is cancerous of both decency and respect within a community’, says Julian. ‘It’s really planned vengeance dressed up as  justice.’

As someone who has fought to save Australians facing the death penalty overseas, and who has seen the seen the devastating impact the death penalty can have on a family, it’s no surprise that his vision for Australia is based on justice and fair treatment for everyone.

Two years ago Julian worked to save Nguyen Van Tuong, a 25-year-old Australian who was convicted of drug trafficking in Singapore and executed.

The experience of defending Mr Nguyen left a deep impression. He remembers witnessing Mr Nguyen’s last farewell to his family before being sent off to his death.

‘To hold his weeping mother and contemplate the wrongfulness of that state-sanctioned killing, is probably the single most powerful incident that I remember in regard to the true futility of capital punishment’, he says.

After Mr Nguyen, Julian continued to defend death penalty cases around the world, especially in Southeast Asia where defendants face harsh penalties for drug offences. He is currently representing three members of the ‘Bali Nine’, young Australians who were caught trafficking drugs in Indonesia, and who now face the death penalty. He is deeply opposed to such harsh penalties, advocating strongly on behalf of the rights of criminals as well as victims.

‘If someone has committed crimes that are heinous, and that person needs to be removed from society, then I think jail, even for the rest of their life, would always be a sufficient penalty.’

Although losing cases such as Mr Nguyen’s are always heartbreaking, it hasn’t all been tragedy. The high points in Julian’s career have been the ‘small number of successes’ in defending people against capital punishment.

The most recent case was in Sudan earlier this year, when he was part of a legal team that successfully intervened to acquit an Australian and some Kenyans who were facing the possibility of execution.  

Julian is committed to changing attitudes in Australia as well as in countries that still use capital punishment, but he acknowledges that it will not be a simple process.

‘A multi-layered approach is the only way. We just have to change the attitudes to the death penalty in the same way that in other struggles at other times, people in a multi-layered way have changed attitudes to slavery, or the rights of women to vote, or the attitude to the environment.’

As for his vision for a better future for Australia, Julian insists that there is no short-term answer. The key, he says, is education.

‘We should put much more money into the training and payment of teachers across all disciplines, and we should spend the resources to make every single school a centre of excellence’, he says. ‘That would lead to much more creative students and much stronger local communities.’  

The treatment of the more vulnerable members of Australian society, such as indigenous Australians and asylum seekers, is something that he is also passionate about changing.

 ‘We have to package a much better vision for Aboriginals, so that they can live in decent social conditions. Much of our treatment of refugees in the last six years is a national shame.’

With the future of his young clients in Bali to be decided soon, he says the measure of a country like Australia is its concern for those who are in a position of powerlessness.  

‘I think we need to refocus the national agenda to provide much stronger support for vulnerable people, to make a better country.’