Julian McMahon did not pause when he got the call in 2006 to help Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Still reeling from the hanging of his client, Australian drug trafficker Van Nguyen, in Singapore some six months earlier, McMahon was asked by his friend and fellow barrister Lex Lasry to get involved in another high stakes death penalty case. 
"There was no question of not assisting once we were asked," says McMahon, Victoria's nominee for Australian of the Year. "We knew the processes by that time. We knew, for instance, how to deal with [the foreign affairs department], We knew how to arrange to correct stories in the media. Things that are outside the normal experience of lawyers."
It is a measure of his passion for human life and human rights that McMahon took up the case, again acting pro bono, after such a harrowing experience with Nguyen.
The three-year battle to save Nguyen's life ended at dawn in Changi Prison on   December 2, 2005. The evening before his death, McMahon comforted Nguyen's mother Kim and brother Khoa, an experience he will never forget.
"The depth and intensity of their grief was deeply confronting," he recalls. "The effect of that on me was to have a sense of revelation and clarity in my mind that whatever the law, whatever the crime, whatever the politics, the process of planning and carrying out a state-sanctioned killing was fundamentally wrong."
When he first met Chan and Sukumaran, they were still sullen, angry and in denial. They had been lying to Indonesia's courts, asserting they had no involvement in the smuggling operation uncovered at Denpasar airport in   April 2005. At the urging of McMahon, their families and others, Chan and Sukumaran began engaging in "serious self-reflection". "They had a choice to live like fools or live like men," he says.
By 2008, their remarkable reformation began. McMahon and others helped them set up a computer class in Kerobokan prison, the first of many vocational and counselling courses that transformed the lives of scores of Indonesian prisoners.
But frantic legal, diplomatic and public relations efforts failed to save Chan and Sukumaran. They were executed on   April 29 last year.
Once again, McMahon comforted grieving families and supporters. It took months to come to terms with his own anguish and sense of loss.
If honoured as Australian of the Year, McMahon would see it a chance to work with volunteers helping those on themargins, or faced with heavy burdens. "Carers for the disabled, or prisoners struggling to reform and reintegrate into society, bringing focus to indigenous incarceration issues. And, of course, death penalty and justice issues."