Title: Trials
Description: OFFENDERS. Pakistan's death row is one of the largest in the world. Around 8,000 prisoners at any time fill its overflowing prisons. Many are innocent, most are poor, all are condemned. Each has a story to tell. In 2011 Isabel Buchanan, a young Scottish lawyer, moved to Pakistan to work in a new legal chambers in Lahore. The chambers was run by a headstrong young Pakistani lawyer, Sarah Belal, who had been fired from a succession of jobs and who had finally found her calling in defending inmates on Pakistan's death row. Belal and Buchanan struck up an unlikely friendship, forged through working in a system that was instinctively hostile to newcomers - and doubly so if they were female. At Sarah's side, and with the help of Nasar, the firm's legendary munshi or clerk, Buchanan plunged into the bewilderingly strange and complex world of Pakistan's justice system. The work was arduous, under-funded, and dangerous.
Subjects: Death row, Death row inmates, Administration of Justice, Social conditions