Indigo Shire will next month welcome one of Australia’s most passionate defenders of human rights, Victorian Supreme Court Justice Lex Lasry.

Justice Lasry, who has won national and international respect for his work on behalf of such high profile accused as Jack Thomas, Van Nguyen, David Hicks and two of the Bali 9, Myuran Sukamaran and Michael Chan, will deliver the inaugural Beechworth Law Lecture on the evening of Saturday 14 June.

This event will officially mark the 150^th anniversary of the Beechworth Historic Courthouse which opened in June 1858. Still with its original furniture and fittings, the Courthouse is a jewel in the crown of the Beechworth Historic & Cultural Precinct and the setting of some of the most fascinating court cases in Victoria’s history, including trials involving Ned Kelly and his mother, Ellen.

Justice Lasry’s address, Justice then and Now, will offer a fascinating and entertaining insider’s view of today’s judicial system contrasted with the vastly different world in which the famous 19^th century Victorian judge, Sir Redmond Barry operated. A regular at the Bench of the Beechworth Courthouse, Barry cemented his place in Australian history as the judge who sentenced Ned Kelly to hang. 

A high-profile opponent of capital punishment Justice Lasry will bring his own perspective to that notorious case as well as those famous cases which have so shaped and defined his own illustrious career.

Justice Lasry will take questions from the audience immediately after the address.

Justice Lasry’s began as a barrister in the criminal law in 1973, initially as a prosecutor but later as a criminal defence lawyer. He was appointed Queens Counsel in 1990.  Apart from a variety of murder, rape, armed robbery, fraud and other trials, highlights of his practice prior to his appointment in 2007 to the Supreme Court of Victoria included many of the best-known legal cases of contemporary Australian history, among them:

• Junior counsel assisting the Costigan Royal Commission into the Federated Ship Painters and Dockers Union in the early 1980s;
• Temporary counsel assisting the National Crime Authority;
• Counsel assisting the National Companies and Securities Commission concerning the collapse of the Rothwells Merchant Bank;
• Junior counsel assisting the Coroner inquiring into eight fatal police shootings in Victoria in the late 1980s;
• Royal Commissioner in Victoria concerning the Metropolitan Ambulance Service in 2000;
• Senior counsel assisting the Coroner in her inquiry into the 2003 Canberra bushfires;
• Defence counsel in Canberra in the murder trial of Anu Singh and Madhavi Rao resulting in acquittal and later the subject of Helen Garner’s book Joe Cinque’s Consolation;
• Defence counsel for Simon Lappas, charged with espionage in the ACT, in 2002;
• Defence counsel for Jack Thomas in his terrorism trial and subsequent appeal from 2004 to 2007;
• Australian defence counsel with Julian McMahon for Van Nguyen in Singapore between 2002 and 2005;
• Australian defence counsel with Darren Bracken for Peter Halloran, Victorian police officer charged with sex offences in the west African country of Sierra Leone;
• Australian counsel with Julian McMahon for Myuran Sukamaran and Michael Chan in the Bali 9 case;
• Defence counsel in the terrorism case concerning members of the Tamil community in Australia; 

Justice Lasry was also independent observer for the Law Council of Australia at the trial of David Hicks at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, between 2004 and 2007. He made two visits to Guantanamo Bay and wrote three reports on the case. 

The Beechworth Law Lecture is one of several events being held in 2008 to commemorate the 150^th anniversary of the Beechworth Historic & Cultural Precinct, a nationally significant collection of Heritage Victoria, National Estate and National Trust-listed gold era buildings. The Courthouse,

Telegraph Station and Gold Warden’s Office were all completed in 1858. Built of local honey-coloured granite, they replaced the weatherboard structures that sprang up soon after gold was discovered in 1852. By then more than 8000 miners were camped on Beechworth’s Spring and Reid’s Creek goldfields alone, and as the population grew, so too did the need for improved services such as law and order, communications, town planning, education, goldfields management and local government. 

The Beechworth Courthouse operated continuously as a working Court for 131 years. Ned Kelly appeared there twice, including his committal hearing over the murders of Constables Lonigan and Scanlon. Ned’s mother Ellen Kelly received a three-year jail sentence for the attempted murder of Constable Fitzpatrick and Elizabeth Scott, the first woman executed in Victoria, received the death sentence in this building. 

Robert O’Hara Burke the ill-fated explorer, and Police Superintendent in Beechworth from 1854-58, was present at the opening of the Court and Justice Sir Redmond Barry presided over many trials there. Sir Isaac Isaacs started his legal career here before rising to become Australia’s first native-born Governor-General. 

The Beechworth Historic & Cultural Precinct also includes the Chinese Protector’s Office, the Gold Warden’s Office, Police Stables, Police Lockup, Police Reserve, Town Hall, Robert O’Hara Burke Memorial Museum and the Powder Magazine, located a short distance from the Precinct complex.