The hanging of Ryan Pt 1 - The man and his mother
PHILIP OPAS QC INTERVIEW 4/8/2003

Up until the case of Ronald Ryan, which we’ll now turn to – did you ever identify with a client?

No. That’s one of the main injunctions that Rob Monahan impressed on me: don’t identify with the client. The first time, when I was at Roy Schilling’s and I saw a man going to jail, I was waiting outside for him to be placed in the Black Maria to be taken to Pentridge when a very experienced criminal lawyer, N. H Sonnenberg, said ‘What’s the matter, son? Is he going in?’ ‘Yes, Mr Sonnenberg.’ ‘Well, you’ll see a lot of that. A lot of that. Always remember one thing. You don’t have to do it.’ And that kept me sane, because I didn’t suffer the result of a conviction.

Nevertheless, that all changed when you defended Ronald Ryan, the last man to be hanged in Victoria. That case took over a year. Would you agree that was when your ability to distance yourself from a client took on a new perspective?

It changed my life. If there was a watershed, that was it. Up till then, I was in favour of capital punishment. I’d had six years’ war service – I’d seen service in Vietnam. I was no stranger to violent death – I’d seen plenty of it. I had no tears of sympathy to shed for a murderer. By the time, I’d met Ronald Ryan, I’d spent time in the condemned cell with four convicted murderers before him. If anyone of them had been hanged, I wouldn’t have been too upset – they were clearly guilty. They were horrible crimes. If you believed in capital punishment, they were the right people to hang. But none of them hanged. Ronald Ryan was different. When I approached his case, I read the depositions and thought ‘This is another hopeless case'.

By ‘hopeless’, what did you mean?

Well, I thought it was an open and shut case where a conviction was inevitable – there were so-called confessions, there were 14 eye-witnesses. It seemed hopeless.

Strangely enough I took a liking to him (Ronald Ryan) the first time I met him. When I went out to Pentridge, I was waiting to see him and I saw a white-haired old lady being escorted by two nuns.

When I got to see Ryan, he said ‘Did you see that old lady going out?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘That was my mother. She’s more interested in saving my soul than my neck – I hope you’re not like that.’ We both laughed.

And then if I might translate that to the last time I ever saw him (the day before I took off to London to hear his appeal before the Privy Council), I told him quite frankly that he’d lose.

The only thing I had going for him was time and if I could postpone the hanging long enough, public opinion might swing the political balance in his favour and prevent the hanging. He smiled, shook hands with me and said ‘You know, mate, we’re playing time on. If you don’t kick a goal soon, we’re going to lose this match.’

You couldn’t hate a man like that. He was never sorry for himself. He said to me many times, ‘We’ve all got to die sometime. But I don’t want to go this way, for something I never did.’

And he never resiled from that. I can’t help feeling with the rapport we had between us that at the end, when his cause was hopeless and he was going to hang, I believed I’d be the one person he’d have told ‘Oh well, we gave it a go. Bad luck, we didn’t make it.’ But nothing like that took place.

The last thing that happened, I believe, was that he wrote me a letter, which I never got. Clearly, some warder took it. It may turn up in Sothebys, but in it, and I know from Father Brosnan who attended him at his hanging, what was in that letter – it was full of gratitude to me for what I had done - thanking me for it, and asking that I attend his hanging, because the last memory on earth that he wished was to see the face of a friend.

He also asked that I go to his requiem. I did neither – I certainly would not have attended a hanging, and I didn’t go to the requiem – because not being a Catholic, this would have been played up in the press as a publicity stunt. I didn’t want that to be my last memory.

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)