During an internship with Amicus, a charity that campaigns against the death penalty, 5 St Andrew's Hill's Sara Williams learned about the harsh laws in the state of Texas and the difficulties of defending 'monsters'

The recent execution of Troy Davis in Georgia has brought the death penalty back into the spotlight. For those who it most closely affects, and for the charities who campaign against it, it never went away. I am a member of such a charity. Amicus is widely known as being at the forefront of the fight against the death penalty. The aims of the charity are to assist in the provision of legal representation for those awaiting capital trial and punishment in the US, or any other country, and to raise awareness of potential abuses of defendants' rights.

Earlier this year I embarked on an internship with Amicus and spent three months assisting a team of lawyers in Texas. My first impression of the state was that it is very proud of its approach to criminal justice. It has sent more individuals to death row than any other – 3,173 to date. Texas kills more death row inmates than any other US state, a grand total of 475 since adopting the lethal injection as its means of execution in 1977, including two within the last month alone.

While being a state-paid district attorney (DA – prosecutor) appears to attract an air of respect, being a defence attorney is often looked down upon; I was often asked how I could help defend such "monsters". I remember one occasion when my boss and I were driving to a court some 40 miles from the office. The traffic had been slow, and as a result we were late and going too fast down the freeway. We were pulled over by the police and asked where we were going. My boss told the officer that we were on our way to try a capital murder. Upon hearing this, the officer, who clearly assumed that we were both from the DA's office and prosecuting the case, let us off and urged us to hurry. I wonder how different his reaction would have been had we been upfront about defending the murder case.

The case we were en route to was that of Travis Mullis. Aged just 19, Travis was accused of killing his newborn baby, a crime that carried a sentence of either life without parole or death. Having failed to negotiate with the DA not to seek the death penalty, we proceeded to trial. As with all of the cases I assisted with, Travis had made full and frank admissions to the police prior to speaking with an attorney. In his case, he had actually turned himself in several days after the killing. As in every case where a confession was obtained, a motion was drafted to have both the written and the video-taped confession excluded from evidence.

As expected, this motion did not succeed and the full video-taped confession, along with its written counterpart, were shown to the jury. At this point, it was almost certain that Travis would be convicted, and so we needed to ensure our mitigation was as compelling as it could be in an attempt to persuade the jury to vote for life rather than death.

Texan juries are often described as being the toughest of all the states – despite the fact that they can effectively save someone's life by voting for life without parole rather than death, few do. Some have later publicly stated that they did not understand the choice they had to make, and believed that if they voted for life, the defendant would one day be able to walk the streets and potentially go on to commit more heinous offences. But life in these cases means just that; in Texas, life without parole means that the offender will spend the rest of his or her days incarcerated, will never be afforded the opportunity to go before a parole board and will be forced to live with the knowledge that they are guilty of a most abhorrent crime.

"No-one should have to live the life that Travis Mullis has lived and then die and go to hell for it… His life is broken through no fault of his own," explains Gerald Bourque, Travis' defence attorney.

Travis, like each of the other clients I came across, had considerable mitigation. Abandoned by his father when he was a baby, he lived first with his grotesquely obese mother, who spent her days in bed, slowly rotting away, while Travis and his other siblings were looked after by a 14-year-old neighbour. During his early months and years, Travis was denied the human contact necessary to enable him to form emotional attachment to others, experience empathy or understand feelings of love. His mother would force Travis and his siblings to sleep in her bed with her, and would sexually abuse them.

Part way through the trial it became apparent that Travis may well have been the biological child of his mother and brother. When his mother died, Travis was adopted by relatives of the family. There he was subjected to further sexual abuse at the hands of his adopted father. As a very young child Travis didn't recognise this abuse, which went either unnoticed or ignored by his adopted mother. When his adopted father was finally sent to jail for these offences, Travis felt abandoned. He grew up with a string of psychological difficulties; he suffered from attachment disorder and was unable to experience normal human emotions. Mentally, he was very unwell. A product of a dysfunctional family, abandoned at every stage of his young life, he had little hope of anything close to a 'normal' adulthood.

Despite his traumatic upbringing and his suffering during a decade of physical and sexual abuse, the jury believed Travis deserved to die for his actions. He now resides on death row at the Allan B Polunsky Unit in Texas, where he will remain until the state decides it is time to take his life. Of course, his right of appeal is automatic, but successful appeals are few and far between, especially for those who are mentally ill.

The Polunsky Unit

During my time in Texas I visited Bobby Moore, who is housed in the Polunsky Unit having been found guilty in 1980 of taking part in the robbery of a shop, where a shop assistant was fatally shot. Bobby was not the shooter; indeed, his co-accused confessed to the shooting and was given a life sentence in exchange for giving evidence against Bobby. Since being sentenced, Bobby has appealed, citing ineffective assistance of counsel.

That appeal was successful; the court found that his initial trial counsel, having presented no mitigating evidence to the jury, was ineffective, and should be struck off. This led to Bobby being afforded a new punishment hearing, with fresh counsel and a different jury. That jury voted death, but later, juror Fred Baca admitted they had failed to understand the judge's directions, believing that if they didn't vote death, Bobby could walk free within a few years. "The options came down to death or, in our minds, release to the general public."

Had he a clearer understanding, he would have voted life and Bobby would not be on death row, awaiting an execution date. "An injustice is about to occur," Baca has been quoted as saying. "The truth is, executing Bobby Moore today is as senseless as the killing of the store clerk in 1981. It doesn't make any sense." Baca is now one of Bobby's many advocates. Bobby's case was one of the first taken on by Amicus, which continues to support him to this day.

I knew nothing of what to expect when meeting with Bobby. Perhaps understandably I was apprehensive, but I needn't have been. It was a rare occasion that Bobby had a visitor. Like many individuals held in the Polunsky Unit, his family and friends were few and far between. Having spent over 30 years on death row, the visitors he had once had gradually stopped coming.

I could immediately see why. The Polunsky Unit is a dungeon of a place. All visitors, including attorneys, are subjected to rigorous searches of both their vehicle and their person, with machine-gun armed officers standing by. Through the barbed wire you can see little but the greyness of the building and the solemnity of its staff. Inmates are not permitted to have any physical contact with their visitors; visitation takes place through thick bullet-proof glass panels, assisted by the use of telephones. Inmates are often handcuffed, behind their backs, throughout visitation.

Attorneys are permitted the use of an attorney booth; a small room no larger than 1.5 square metres, where they sit on a concrete block or, if lucky, an old plastic chair, and talk to their client via telephone. Again, the thick glass separates lawyer and client.

Meeting Bobby was a most humbling experience, one that had a profound effect on me. At 6ft tall with a muscular build, he could easily have looked intimidating, but was one of the most soft-spoken men I have ever met. He talked about his experience of 'the row', and of how he reads and listens to the radio to keep up with current affairs around the world.

He spoke eloquently, intelligently and with charisma. We discussed our views on various topics; politics, law-making, criminal justice. He told me how in the Ellis Unit, where death row was based from 1965 until 1999, he would be permitted to go to the library and read various texts on criminal law, in an effort to be of some assistance to his attorneys.

In short, he was not what I expected, and I enjoyed my time with him. He opened my eyes to the real human cost of the death penalty and how, in a very small way, I was able to make it bearable for him for those few hours. Bobby now writes to me every month or so. I'd like to think my replies give him some element of relief to an otherwise depressing existence.

Sara Williams is a pupil barrister at 5 St Andrew's Hill and blogs at www.swilliamsamicus.blogspot.com. To find out more about Amicus, including information about internships and other ways you can assist, visit www.amicus-alj.org.