By Brian Anderson
Valley Times

Aug. 6, 2001

Like thousands of young British students, Heather Lindup packed her bags in the early days of summer for a dream trip to the United States.

From her home in Guildford, Surrey, 30 miles southwest of London, Lindup planned her monthlong trip to San Francisco, a destination where tourist-carting cable cars rise above and dip back into the bright lights of a big city.

But the 21-year-old woman in her final year at the University of Central England was coming for more than sourdough bread bowls, a wharf, island tours, ferry rides and snapshots. Lindup was coming here in hopes of helping save the lives of convicted killers.

"Most of us are passionate about (abolishing) the death penalty," Lindup said recently at a San Francisco law office. "If I can help do my part, that's one more person off of death row."

About 50 students from the midcountry college town of Birmingham are scattered about the United States this summer in a rare program pairing idealistic young Britons with American defense attorneys. They are sifting through case files, re-interviewing witnesses and assisting in appeals for some of the country's more than 3,700 death row inmates.

They have come from a country without capital punishment to one where statistically more than two people each and every month have been executed since 1976.

"Actually working on a case makes it kind of come to life," Lindup said. "You see them as people, not just some guy who killed this many people."

On the student's desk this summer is a voluminous case file for David Leslie Murtishaw, a Southern California man convicted in the 1978 shooting deaths of three University of Southern California film students near Mojave in Kern County. The victims in the case were about the same age as Lindup when Murtishaw opened fire on them in a drug- and alcohol-induced fog, contending later that he thought the filmmakers were shooting at him.

Crime scene photos had to be examined, transcripts read, arguments digested.

"It's a lot more intense than I thought it would be," Lindup said.

Late last month, a federal appeals court in San Francisco overturned Murtishaw's death sentence, ruling jurors in the decades-old case were improperly instructed.

Created in 1995, the program recruits future law students interested in working on death penalty cases. Students sign up for the program in international human rights, and they are shipped off to the United States, where overworked defense attorneys will take all the help they can get.

"In post-conviction work on death penalty cases, handling the case properly costs a lot more than what you are paid," said David Schwartz, a San Francisco attorney working with Lindup. "The opportunity to have intelligent people coming and working with us is very exciting."

Program founder Julian Killingley said in a telephone interview from his University of Central England office that his students get far better legal training working on death penalty cases in the United States than working with lawyers in their homeland. Attorneys in the English justice system, which for the most part is similar to the American judicial system, are better funded than their American counterparts.

Killingley, who jokingly called himself a "meddling limey," acknowledged that students do mostly "donkey work." "This is a great learning experience," he said. "My commitment to this is that the U.S. is the only First World country that maintains the death penalty. I have a personal commitment to assist people to try and get rid of it."

For Lindup, who was ambivalent about capital punishment before traveling to San Francisco, the program has been an eye-opener.

"It's not that we think our law is perfect," said Lindup as she wrapped up her stay in the United States. "It's just that we're talking about a person's life. It's just not right to take any more lives."