Human Rights Lawyer On Serial Killers, Execution Methods and Guantanamo Bay | Minutes With

I've lost six people over the years and uh two with the electric chair two with the gas chamber and two with a um lethal ejection you know if people say it doesn't make any difference that's the electric chair just disgusting that you put 2,400 volts of electricity through someone's head [Music] when was the first time you learned about the death penalty well I had seen in a history book um Jon of Ark being burned at the stake um so I thought oh this is really barbaric I mean her only crime is to beat the English

in a few battles you know so I was really impacted by that and then I decided when I was about 16 to write a history essay about the death penalty and it came as a big surprise to me that um that they were still doing it in America America I thought I'd just go and sort them out and teach them that it was wrong and how was your journey to to doing that well you know they have a plan for young people and that plan very often is not what you want to do and the

plan for me was to go study science at Cambridge I I'm not interested in science I mean my a levels were physics chemistry maths and further maths and I just find that incredibly boring and I went to Cambridge the next week and said I'm not coming to Cambridge I'm going a go to America and do what I want to do and this guy in a tweed jacket said oh this is the biggest mistake you'll ever make in your life I said I bet it's not and so I went to America instead and what was your

first experience of deathro light can you talk me through like what was going through your mind when you walked and and met those prisoners and oh I remember it very vividly it was a place called Reedsville Georgia where the Georgia State Prison was I was down visiting people on death row when I was about 20 and look it was the summer of my second year of college and university in America and really I was only useful for one thing which was to go visit the prisoners I remember I was going into Reedsville Georgia State Prison

and I was thinking what am I going to talk to these guys about and why do they want to talk to me I mean it must be miserable on death row and here am I coming in to talk about my my incredibly fortunate life and I went in and oh it was just great I mean you know most of my best friends over the years have been people on death row let's face it and this notion that you shouldn't have an emotional attachment to your clients just stupid of course you should I know some lawyers

take the approach that you don't have a relationship why do you think that that's a a nice way to to approach it what what is it about nice I'm not sure nice is the word I'd use for it no it's because it's the only human way to do do it when you're representing someone in front of a jury if you don't like them or if you're not friends with them that's going to come across and I normally would spend about three years preparing for a trial because it takes a lot of work and by then

you've really got to know the person and we are all better than our worst 15 minutes what were the ways in which the US government were inflicting capital punishment because it was varied at the time and I know it's changed a bit still is varied I mean look I've lost six people over the years and uh two were the electric chair two with the gas chamber and two with a um lethal ejection and you know if people say it doesn't make any difference there the electric chair just disgusting that you put 2,400 volts of electricity

through someone's head and you know Nicki Ingram he and I were born in the same Hospital Aden Brooks in Cambridge and and um I had to watch him die and I like Nikki we' been friends for 12 years when they killed him and he first I'm and oh God you know they go through all that nonsense about last meals and Nikki said I don't want a last meal but you're about to kill me and he said I want a last cigarette so I asked if they'll give him a last cigarette and they say no because

it's bad for his health and I say you got to be kidding me you're planning to kill this poor guy so I went out and told him the medeor and that they were humiliated by that so they gave him a last cigarette but then they shave his head shave his leg and put you know 2,400 volts through him it's just disgusting it's not easy after Nikki's execution I mean I still have PTSD from that if I close my eyes right now I can see the black and white of him being electrocuted right in front of

me it's horrible and it's not a quick process is it it it's really inhumane in the sense of the time that it takes yeah and you know Jesse defaro that is headqu on fire because uh the gods didn't like him so they didn't put the right stuff and so yeah it takes a lot longer it took Nikki wasn't killed by the first round of electricity yeah and then there's the gas chamber Edward Johnson the first person I lost um was 1987 and I was very young and I really didn't know what I was doing and

if I knew today I mean if I knew then what I know today he'd be alive and he was innocent and it really o but they gassed him in the gas chamber and that was zeyon B the stuff they used in aitz now you know I'm half Jewish myself I don't think you have to be half Jewish to figure out that's not a nice thing and indeed I I walked into the Gest chamber with them um it's just horrible and then you know Lethal Injections no better I mean they because they have people who aren't

doctors doing it so they can't find a vein and they stick things around for up to an hour trying to find a vein before they do that and then they screw it up all the time so it's all bad there's not if you ask me which way I want to be executed it's of old age you can execute me of old age by giving me too much gin just when I'm you know about to become uh incompetent and that'll be fine that's what I'm going to do anyhow so you know I don't need them to

do it to me what's going through the minds of the people you're working with in the leadup to their execution and what's that process like to them and how does it well it varies hugely I mean that I just wrote a book about my Dad and Larry luncha because both Dad and Larry were what we call bipolar so Larry was in prison because he was accused of killing three people um Larry had a gambling problem it's all illegal gambling in Georgia so he ends up $10,000 in debt to this illegal gambling out of it and

according to the prosecution he pretends to be an FBI agent and goes in there and ends up shooting them all that's not what happened I I can't tell you exactly what happened because it's privileged even after death um but let's just say he was covering for someone who did it um but you know he was involved so he would have got uh life but he shouldn't have got death and Larry tried to get himself executed several times over eight years I represented him he would try to commit suicide by electric chair and I would try

and talk him out of it each time and we came within 40 minutes of his execution four times and once we got it stopped with 58 seconds left to go I was on the phone to the US Supreme Court and the nice clerk there said can you wait a minute I said no we don't have a minute so um so that was pretty traumatic but Larry through all the first time just wanted to take his own life by by the time we got to the fifth time when I couldn't stop it he had got Christianity

and he really believed and he really thought he was going to heaven and so um he was very different I mean he honestly went to the electric chair utterly happy and when they asked him for a last statement he said Lord forgive them for they know not what they do which what Jesus supposedly said on the cross so um you know that's that was fabulous actually because I couldn't make his life better really because he was going to be locked up forever even if we got the death penalty knocked off and Larry just couldn't deal

with that um and I couldn't stop it and I was there for his execution and he was just incredibly generous um and you know Larry wasn't a quad boy but um but he didn't do what they said he did but um yeah so they're very different now some people are terrified as they should be but it's all just so barbaric and it's always the middle of the night and you always come out of the execution chamber and you look up at the stars and think Jesus did that really make the world a better place I

read that you always go to the um execution of of clients that do get to that that point and why is that well someone's got to be there as their friend and if it's not me who's it going to be what is it like in that space is it clinical is it emotional oh is it emotional it is for me but um no it's not clinical they try to make it clinical by having your last words your last meal your last prayer but that's all for the people who are doing this stuff and you know

look I've had over 400 people over presented on that and six of them got killed so you know you I I don't dwell on that because I've got to prevent it in 98% of the cases and why do you think that or why do you find that working with innocent people is more difficult than people that are guilty of no it's not more difficult it's just sort of boring um first if you ask an innocent person like I ask you did you murder the MU youngs on October the 16th 198 86 well who did then

I don't know see you're useless you're totally useless I mean if you did it you could help me out but you're useless but actually innocent people are dangerous in many other ways um innocent people think that no one could possibly convict them because they know they didn't do it so how's 12 people going to say you're guilty Beyond A Reasonable Doubt so they make immensely bad decisions Chris Maharaj great case in point very intelligent guy businessman couldn't believe anyone would convict him so when his idiot defense lawyer told him not to put his six Alibi

Witnesses on he said oh fine I know why do I need them no one could convict me when the defense lawyer said don't take the witness stand to say you're innocent he went along with it and then the jury comes along and convicts him and he fainted which is sort of a strong evidence that he didn't do it as anything but innocent people make very stupid decisions because they just can't imagine so you know I'm not I really don't like that I think it's interesting to understand what the worst thing someone did and then try

to mitigate it and try to get people to understand that's human but it's not very interesting just who done it I mean just from my perspective I I've represented lots of innocent people don't get me wrong and you know I'm glad to get them off but um but it's not very interesting and do you feel that the US will ever abolish capital punishment of course they will the only issue is whether they do it while I'm still alive how close is it to being abolished what's the work to do before I mean look actually we're

winning we're winning massively and if you look over my career um it's gone down hugely we were sentencing you know two or 3 hundred people to death each year now it was down to about 10 last year the problem is this that the Supreme Court because there are six Catholics on the Supreme Court and they all listen to the pope about abortion but they don't listen to the pope about the death penalty um the six right-wingers or fascists as I prefer to term them um are very much in favor of the death penalty just as

the people of America are becoming against it so there are 2,600 people on death row the Supreme Court wants to kill them all um and there's going to be a bit of a bloodbath I think because I don't think we're going to be able to stop them um doing some bad stuff but I have a project called the postmortem project where I'm representing 187 dead people it's really cool no one complains about my representation no no it's because I want to prove that we've executed innocent people and I thought when I started that project that

it'd be really hard to prove many but you begin by looking at the last words and if your last words were I'm really sorry I killed six people probably not but a huge number The Last Words My Favorite was this guy in Missouri whose last words were you're about to rescued an innocent person and you can kiss my but a huge number said something to the effect that you're about to kill an innocent person and that's not because they're making it up and as we've looked at these cases uh and done the investigation postmortem that

should have been done when they were still alive and then were put it on TV and that we can prove a huge number of innocent people were killed and that's what's going to stop the death penalty just as it did in Britain you about 60 years ago when we killed a few innocent people what is the percentage of people that are executed on death row that are innocent is there well according to my yeah work at the moment is about 133% so you know that means that in one time out of eight or so we're

killing the wrong person but where you do your job right I mean we were able to exonerate more people in Louisiana where I worked for 10 years than they executed so there they were batting a 50% error rate I believe in your early career you met Ted Bundy as well Ted Bundy was I I met him in the Florida state prison and it was just wacko Jacko Ted Bundy as people may not remember his case because it's a long time ago and I met him way back in the um inl 1980 881 something like that

80 or 81 and he was portrayed as a Suave intelligent person there was a whole issue about whether he even understood he was going to be executed because he was genuinely crazy and you know one thing I wish is you know I was only a student then so I have no Insight really um but I wish I'd had a chance to really delve into why he did that sort of thing and what what was because that's the way we're going to stop it in the future I would like to talk a little bit about how

you came to work with um people in Grant tanamo Bay so well the thing is the US government took the position that after 911 there's terrible thing about America we're going to show how tough we are so we're going to lock all these the worst of the worst terrorists in the world right and that's what they said they were the worst of the worst terrorists in the world but you know that was the beginning and it was really hostile back then and you know the truth is it was hostile in Europe too the Europeans were

all against us and I called around all my death penalty friends and they just didn't want to do it and this was very much post 911 and I underestimated the emotional impact on Americans of 9/11 and it took us two and a half years to get in there but we got in eventually and I went down there thinking oh you know these are a bunch terrorist I'm going I have a hard time explaining why they were in Afghanistan whether that's America's business or not still I get down there and I'm having a terrible time finding

an honest to goodness terrorist really it was Dreadful the Muhammad Al gani 14 years old now he said he was 14 but the Americans didn't believe him and so I ask the CIA guys I say well how would you prove how old someone was and they start talking about your dental records why don't you just go get his birth certificate and so we sent off for his birth certificate and sure enough showed he was 14 years old and he was stuck in Guantanamo because they thought he was an Al-Qaeda Finance year and this is how

it came about they were interrogating him and he spoke Saudi Arabic and they the Americans couldn't speak Arabic so they used a Yi translator and in ymani Arabic the word zalat means money in Saudi Arabic it means salad salad so they're interrogating this kid and they say when you went to basan what zalot did you have and he thinks these people are idiots and he said I didn't have any zalot and they they're talking about money he's talking about tomatoes and so they say you had to have zalot and he said no I could get

zalot anywhere I wanted it and in carachi and they say oh where could you get zalot in Karachi and they think he's talking about money again so they think he's an Al-Qaeda Finance here he lists a series of vegetable stalls in Karachi and they wrote this down and then they accused him of being an Al-Qaeda Finance year and as long as he didn't have a lawyer there was no way he could disprove it and then I got in to see him and you know oh my goodness and there were so many of those stories yeah

I mean they're just mad but it is a true tribute I think to the power of the American system that we were able to Sue and we won in the Supreme Court that you just can't lock people up without any sort of due process and so we've now released 750 of the 780 prisoners and then there's another 17 who are cleared for release so that means that they've got it wrong over 98% of the time and obviously the the thing that most people I think associate with guantan Bay is is water boarding and that the

kind of torture that goes on there what was happening when you were in grantan when you were first going and and at the start what was happening behind closed doors in guantan Bay was it water boarding and more yeah when I was first down there there was all sorts of bad stuff going on that was I got in in 2004 and I would talk to these guys and honestly you know I talked to benan Muhammad a British person from not far from here in London and he starts telling me about being taken they thought he

was a dirty bomber and they had tortured him about whether he had ever learned how to build a nuclear bomb and he' said no no no he tells me for three days about being taken to Morocco where they took a razor blade to his genitals every um every two weeks for a year and a half and then he was taken to the dark prison in Afghanistan where they played loud music at him um and it was what I loved about bam is he knew all the songs and you know he had M&M um played at

him forever and so forth and benam is the uh expert in this and he says look raise blade you knew when it was going to start you knew when it was going to end it was painful but at least you knew that the problem with the music was it was designed to drive you mad and you could feel your mind slipping away I came out of talking to benyan Muhammad and I thought I was suffering from PTSD and you just think what he's going through is just insanity and that's you know this is one of

the many things I learned about torture that I never really wanted to know that that we in 2001 the Americans just totally lost our minds and thought that we were going to somehow make the world a better place by torturing people then I I think my job was simply to tell the world what was going on uh and our principle with Guantanamo was if we open it up to public inspection they'll close it down because the world will see what a nathar it is but that hasn't happened no it it has I mean we've won

the battle George Bush says it was a mistake there are only 30 people left there now and you know compared to most battles we've got 95% of them out it's amazing how many people have you represented um from guantan Bay I've had 87 people there and 85 are out and the last two will be out soon amazing yeah it's great see that's what I love about my job I get to get them out and then I get to go visit them back at their homes and the US government did say that it would shut Onan

I think it was was it 15 years ago yeah it was on it was January the 21st 2009 yeah and how close is it to being shut down do you think oh I don't know if it'll I think it'll just be shut down in my life if I outlive HED Shake Muhammad but it won't be shut down for quite a while why because the Nutty Republicans want to keep it open as if it's doing the world any good I mean it's a stain on on America's reputation that ought to be closed tomorrow but I don't

think it will be what are the biggest threats to human rights at the moment for us if you look around Europe to all of your populist leaders and youve got Maloney in Italy you've got Victor auan in Hungary um all of these people playing on hatred um and that's classic isn't it it's what politicians do when they don't have any ideals and so you got Trump in America and it's so easy to get people to hate uh and it's actually not so easy to get people to be decent to each other but what the powerful

people do is always play the poor people off against each other so that no one notices they're the problem and that's the essence of the politics of fear and the politics of hatred now I know what your ideal world is I don't have to grill you on that because your ideal world and everyone in this room is exactly the same and our Ideal World obviously doesn't have prisons in it it doesn't have torture in it it doesn't have poverty it doesn't have a lack of uh education or a lack of of healthc care and all

that so we know what our ideal is and actually life is very very simple every decision you ever make should take you closer to your ideal um but when people don't have ideals that's when they get in a big old muddle and they think we need to have less immigration we need to have more prisons which is just Madness and so all of our Lives just have to be about that and if you don't do that you go directly to hell now that used to be a great threat but if you don't believe in hell

it loses its bite doesn't it we just say oh he's an evil guy then we don't understand at all and this is going to happen again you you mentioned when we spoke initially that what's really interesting about your work is that it's often not about law but about power can you tell me a bit about that I thought well it's all about power I mean I've been put on trial for contempt of cour a few times and well I've been acquitted each time I really have very little butt contempt for the legal system I think

it's a hopeless way to resolve people's disputes and I and and it's about power it's about a powerless person needing power on her or his side and um so I suppose if you look at Guantanamo that's a good illustration in the history of Guantanamo Bay we got 750 people out and the courts have ordered the release of two and the other 748 we've got out by getting the truth out publicizing it to the world and embarrassing the hell out of the government so the journalism has much more power the court of public opinion is much

more effective than the court of law the court of law is presided over by a bunch of Judges who basically I went to school with and they were twits then in their twits now sorry but that's just the way it is is a massive generalization the court of public opinion is run by people and at root the people who don't take themselves seriously like the judges do are are much easier to persuade to do the right thing so and there there are ways to do that that are just sort of interesting so we can get

people to do the right thing much easier than judges what's the proudest moment of your career C seriously I don't know it's hard to say there have been lots of things I'm in a pride we should just preface it's a deadly sin um but but the thing I'm actually most proud of was being there for Larry luncha I was driving down to his execution and um Emily my wife and I we stopped off at a gas station to get them on the phone and so I get Larry on the phone and I say how you

doing Larry and he's set to die in two and a half hours right and he says all right Clive you pick up my appeals again so I run off to get on the phone with the judge and the Attorney General is outside the toilet in this gas station with these American truckers with their cover rolls and their chewing tobacco and all the rest of it by all the time and I'm arguing with the judge um and Emily's still on the phone with Larry and Larry said this and this was the kindest thing anyone's ever said

he said um well good I know he won't be able to stop it but I had to give him one last chance cuz he's the only friend I've ever had when Larry told me that I was the only friend it had that's the proudest moment in my life to have been able to be that and why because he because I was he told me I was his friend and that came spontaneously and genuinely and um what more could you really ask no lights are on in the house and we always left the light on if

I'm out and um walked in I have a man stretched out on my floor I checked him and he was dead under no way that I could see was I not going to jail