The lawyer who saved 1,000 from the noose

Father-of-five Lehrfreund, 53, was brought up in Finchley and Hampstead as “a typical, northwest London Jew”. He was barmitzvah at Hendon Reform synagogue, and went to Highgate School — then a very traditional institution, where, he says, he first encountered antisemitism.

That was one factor that, from an early age, fuelled a passion for justice and human rights. Another was his ancestry: on his mother’s side, his grandparents arrived in Britain at the turn of the 20th century fleeing pogroms in Russia and Poland; on his father’s, they escaped Nazi Leipzig very late, in 1938.

That passion was fully awakened when he took a human rights option while studying law at Reading University, followed by a master’s degree in the same field. For a while, he lectured at the School of Oriental and African Studies, until one day in 1992 he saw an advert in the Guardian, offering a job with the London law firm Simons Muirhead Burton, to work on death penalty cases in the Commonwealth Caribbean.

Its then-senior partner, Bernard Simons, a legendary figure in legal circles for his willingness to take on unpopular causes, interviewed Lehrfreund and hired him on the spot.

Soon after he started, Lehrfreund got a phone call from his new boss. “He asked me to go to Jamaica,” he recalled. “I said, ‘when do you want me to leave?’ and he told me, next day — and that he’d got me a one-way ticket. I asked him when I’d be coming back, and he told me, when I was done.”

Deep ends don’t come much deeper than this. Lehrfreund ended up spending a month commuting by bus through some of the roughest neighbourhoods of Kingston, which was in the grip of a ferocious crime wave, to visit death-row inmates at the notorious St Catherine’s prison. “It was intense,” he says. “Incredibly hot, and the atmosphere in the prison was very hostile — the officers very deliberately tried to wind me up.

“Death-row prisoners were being housed in appalling conditions, locked up almost 24 hours a day in tiny cells with just a bucket to use as a toilet, in a colonial jail built a century earlier that had ceased to be fit for purpose.”

From that crucible came what is still one of the most important cases Lehrfreund has fought: that of two men he came to know well, Earl Pratt and Ivan Morgan. Both had been on death row for more than 14 years, and had already survived three planned execution dates. “They’d gone through unimaginable stress — being weighed for the drop, told they would die three or four days later.”

Adding to the stress was the sudden and untimely death, a few months later, of Bernie Simons. “I found myself in charge of the firm’s death penalty unit, still in my twenties, bearing this awful responsibility of trying to save men’s lives,” he recalls. The ultimate right of appeal from Jamaica was to the Privy Council in London, a panel of what were then the Law Lords (now Supreme Court judges). In 1981, the court had already rejected an appeal based on a claim that spending many years on death row amounted to cruelty. But in 1993, Lehrfreund and the team of barristers he assembled — led by the QC Geoffrey Robertson, with the young Keir Starmer as a junior — persuaded the court to look at the issue again, claiming that the long ordeals of men such as Pratt and Morgan amounted to an abuse of human rights.

They won. The court ruled that no one should spend more than five years on death row — a sensational victory that meant more than 200 prisoners in Jamaica alone no longer faced the gallows.

As the judgment was applied elsewhere, the sentences of many others were commuted.

Until last week, the day of the ruling was still probably the best of Lehrfreund’s professional life. “I remember coming out and there were dozens of reporters and photographers. I said to Keir: ‘You go and speak to them.’ ‘No way,’ he said. ‘That’s your job, mate.’”

The resulting publicity meant that the little Simons Muirhead Burton death penalty office was suddenly inundated with prisoners, lawyers and human rights organisations from all over the Caribbean, all looking for help. The new workload saw Lehrfreund joined by Parvais Jabbar in 1995. They have worked together ever since, and formally inaugurated the charity in 2004.

The years after Pratt and Morgan became a whirlwind, as Lehrfreund and Jabbar and their “dream team” — Fitzgerald and Starmer — “went round the world, fighting for stays of execution and challenging legal aspects of death penalty regimes”. Their reach spread from the Caribbean to Africa and Asia.

There were some hairy moments, such as the day Lehrfreund and his late first wife arrived at the Gare du Nord in Paris for a bank holiday weekend to hear themselves tannoyed and told to call his office — because, unexpectedly, the hanging of two prisoners in Belize had been scheduled for the following morning. In some desperation, he tried to get a stay from the Privy Council, but all the judges had left the office for their weekend retreats.

Eventually, having tracked the court registrar down to a cottage in Wales, the vital document was issued and faxed. But when the local lawyer working with Lehrfreund tried to serve it at the jail, he was refused admittance, and told that if he didn’t leave immediately, he would be arrested.

“Finally,” Lehrfreund says, “the British High Commissioner agreed to deliver it in person to the Belizean attorney-general, and warn him that if he failed to comply with it, he could be charged with murder himself.”

There were other, seminal victories, such as the replacement of the mandatory death sentence for murder throughout the Caribbean and in parts of Africa with a discretionary sentence, so that judges now reserve capital punishment for “the rarest of the rare”.

One such challenge in Uganda resulted in all 900 prisoners being removed from death row. Meanwhile, The Death Penalty Project began working towards the even bigger goal of outright abolition.

With Sierra Leone, that story began in 2007, when AdvocAid asked for help from DPP with the cases of several women who had killed their husbands after years of violent abuse. Having succeeded in getting the sentences quashed, they began to work together with the Death Penalty Research Unit at Oxford University on an intense campaign of persuasion and advocacy, compiling compelling evidence that capital punishment was arbitrary and unfair – and did not deter crime.

The team prepared a series of submissions to the leader of Sierra Leone, President Julius Bio, on both the flaws inherent in the death penalty and alternative sentences. He proved receptive, stating a year ago that the sanctity of human life applied even to death row inmates.

During pandemic lockdowns, the burgeoning coalition deepened its support with weekly Zoom calls between DPP, AdvocAid, the British High Commission, EU and UN human representatives in Sierra Leone, and parliamentarians.

Last week’s vote was the climax. Other countries, if Lehrfreund and his team succeed, may now follow suit. “I’m hoping this will create momentum,” he says. But if it does, he stresses: “We are only advisers. We are brought in to provide some expert help.

“But this can’t be done by outsiders. It has to be led by people on the ground.”

Why does this matter so much?

“That the state can kill its own citizens has always struck me as medieval,” Lehrfreund says, “and the idea you punish killing, what we rightly regard as the ultimate crime, by more killing, makes no sense.

“And 30 years of visiting death row clients has taught me that these are vulnerable, damaged people, often with severe mental illness — while most have not had fair trials.”

He cherishes a text he got last week from Starmer, who remains a close friend to this day.

It consisted of one word: “Amazing!”

The Death Penalty Project provides free legal representation to individuals facing execution around the world

Donations can be made at: deathpenaltyproject.org/donate-today/