Philip OPAS QC interview 4/8/2003

So you had a range of forces against you, but you nevertheless were determined to do your best for your client (Ryan).

Definitely.

You say, though, this experience changed your life. Can you tell us why and how it did, because it's not as though you hadn't acted for murderers. You said before you'd never previously held views about the wrongness and rightness of capital punishment, but this changed everything.

While Ryan and Walker were on the run, which was for a period of 17 days, they carried out a bank robbery. The police were looking for them all over the place and the media was full of statements about these men being killers, dangerous, and there was a hue and cry seeking information from the public and warning the public to the stage - long before I was on the case - that they were on the run somewhere in Elwood. I was living at Caulfield at the time. My wife (Stella) said to me every day "Hurry home - Ryan and Walker are on the loose, I don't want to be here on my own at night". I said "They're not going to come here." Then when I told her I'd been offered the brief and had accepted, she said "Get him off and don't come home."

And that was her feeling (which persisted) until some of her friends asked her about the case when it started to get publicity and I never discussed my cases at home, he was about to give evidence, and people assumed Stella knew more about it than they did, which was untrue. I said to her - because I was working around the clock on this case - "He's going to give evidence tomorrow. I'll get you a seat in court, you come and hear him (as) I don't want to discuss it". She heard him give evidence - she came home and said "He's innocent". And that changed her view. However, I became convinced that he couldn't have done it and he didn't do it.

I came to like him, in breach of my general upbringing (which was that) you don't identify with a client - I did identify with him. Although I was in favour of capital punishment until the Ryan case, I felt that here was an innocent man who'd been executed. From my own general experience, I didn't think the death penalty deterred anyone from committing murder, because I'm convinced that you and I could kill somebody if we were in a position where our own lives depended on it, and I'd like to think you or I wouldn't break into a bank. But the pugnacious instinct is inherent in all of us, and it may be self-defence and justifiable homicide, but I believe you and I could kill someone. My experience with rehabilitation of convicted murderers up till then, anyway, was that usually it was a one-off offence, killing someone close to them in the family grouping. That's before the days of contract killings and drug-related murders. That got me thinking that playing God and deciding who was unfit to live amongst us is not our role. I've faced death myself, not only during the war, but in life-threatening illnesses. I'm not afraid of death - it's an inevitable part of living, but putting someone to death by our own actions, I don't think achieves any of the aims of punishment. It's neither a deterrent to other people, nor is it an effective punishment fitting the crime, in the way that possibly imprisonment is - and rehabilitation should be the aim. I think that's possible and even probable, but I'm discounting in that those who are drug addicts and those who are cold-blooded contract killers.

Conducted for the Bar Oral History project by Juliette Brodsky in the Neil McPhee Room, Owen Dixon Chambers and filmed by Stewart Carter (People Pictures)