Julian McMahon did not hesitate when he got the call in mid-2006 to help Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Still reeling from the hanging of his client, Australian drug trafficker Van Nguyen, in Singapore six months earlier, McMahon (pictured) was contacted by his friend and fellow barrister Lex Lasry to get involved in another taxing and high-stakes death penalty case. 
"There was no question of not assisting once we were asked," he said. "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 the passion for human life and human rights of McMahon, Victoria's nominee for Australian of the Year, that he 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 ... carrying out a state-sanctioned killing was fundamentally wrong."
At the urging of McMahon, their families and many others, Chan and Sukumaran began engaging in "serious self-reflection".
"They had a choice: to live like fools or live like men," he said.
Optimism was crushed in late 2014 when outgoing Indonesian president Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono refused to rule on a longstanding clemency petition, and his successor, Joko Widodo, announced that he would commence the mass killing of drug felons.
Frantic legal, diplomatic and public relations efforts failed to save Chan and Sukumaran. They were executed on   April 29 last year.
If honoured as Australian of the Year, McMahon said he would see it as an opportunity to engage with many parts of Australian life. "Especially working with volunteers helping those on the very margins, or faced with heavy burdens," he said. "And, of course, death penalty and justice issues."