SHE remembers it ending with one loud bang.

It was not so long after Andrew Chan stood before her, possessing a grave yet calm acceptance of what was to come.

“Well, we’ve tried our best,” he told Veronica Haccou.

The Myrtleford lawyer doesn’t want to “talk about myself”.

It has to be about the fight against capital punishment that began through the doomed Bali 9 drug smugglers. It’s being “a fierce warrior” for what Chan and Myuran Sukumaran saw as their legacy.

“What I have learnt from the boys is courage under fire, how to keep doing the right thing because it is the right thing to do,” she says.

Her story began eight years ago. Prominent Melbourne human rights lawyer Julian McMahon had put a call out for an instructing solicitor. He was after someone who, like Ms Haccou, could speak fluent Indonesian.

Part of it came to a close on April 29, soon after midnight. That, as the nation knows, was when Chan and Sukumaran and six other men were executed on Nusakambangan Island.

Ms Haccou and Mr McMahon were there, the lights above the firing range glaring in the distance.

Earlier, they had to bear witness to families saying goodbye, watching “mothers being peeled off their sons, wives off their husbands, kids from their parents”.

“And at the end of the day it wasn’t (Indonesian president) Joko Widodo who had to pat the mothers on the shoulder and say, ‘the time with your child is up’.”

The lawyers were the last to see Chan and Sukumaran when they were transferred from Bali to Nusakambangan in early March, then the first — with Australian Consul General in Bali Majell Hind — when they arrived on the prison island.

“We had a very close relationship with the boys,” Ms Haccou says.

“What people have to understand is the boys did commit a serious crime.

“But the boys themselves never asked to be released. They asked that they beallowed to live, and they lived such a full life.”

It was a bond that continued in death. They had the grim task of identifying the men’s bodies after their execution.

They escorted the ambulances that carried them onto ferries off the island, making sure they were there “all the way” until their bodies were handed over to the Australian authorities.

She draws some solace from the decision that Chan and Sukumaran’s families not stay on the island that night.

But the other death row families didn’t leave.

“It was such a distressing moment when they heard the shots,” she said.

The family of Filipino Mary Jane Veloso did not know she had won a reprieve. They were left howling her name, over and over again. For her salvation.

“It was such a cruel, cruel thing to do. We hope the boys knew that she was reprieved,” Ms Haccou says.

“That was the one thing that they were quite upset about, more than their own circumstances.”

Much has been made of the cocky, arrogant young men who were Chan and Sukumaran when they and the rest of the Bali 9 were arrested a decade ago, having tried to smuggle 8.3 kilograms of heroin to Australia.

When Ms Haccou — who is originally from Indonesia — joined the legal team in 2007, the pair had changed, aware of the gravity of what they had done.

The time she spent on the case kept growing. It makes her grateful for the support she got from North East law firm Nevin, Lenne and Gross, where she is a partner.

“It certainly became a very involved case, particularly in recent years,” she says. “This year alone I had to travel to Indonesia eight times.”

The end, as fate had it, was never in her sights. It was always to have the pair’s death sentences commuted to life in jail.

For that they worked, “and worked and worked”, to make Mr Widodo accountable.

His line that it was his duty, as president, to carry out the law and have the men executed riles Ms Haccou.

Indonesian law as it stands, she says, makes clear the precedents and discretions to either grant or reject clemency. That involved giving “full and fair consideration” to every individual appeal.

“Widodo had indicated quite clearly that he hadn’t read it and, in fact, it hasn’t been disputed that he hasn’t read it,” she says.

“He rejected clemency without reading what these boys were doing for 10 years.

“We have seen letters from inmates saying that they had really changed their lives for the better.

“And to say to the Australians that a plea for clemency can be an attack on their country’s sovereignty is, to be perfectly honest, hypocritical.”

Her first day back at work on Monday was full of appointments. Country folk with simpler legal needs.

She had wanted to hold off talking publicly until the men’s funerals were held.

Ms Haccou was one of four people thanked at Andrew Chan’s service for theirefforts in trying to save the pair’s lives.

Now might have been the time to step well back, lest the distressing enormity of what happened inflicted some emotional collateral damage.

Ms Haccou though has no such plan. She is committed to eradicating the “double-standard” of the Indonesians paying blood money to save their own citizens on death row overseas, while continuing to carry it out at home.

For a month, Mr Widodo has had on his desk a set of draft laws that involve a comprehensive revision of Indonesia’s criminal code. Under this, execution would be given a new status — no longer the main punishment, instead a “special, alternative” penalty.

Ms Haccou wants the death penalty abolished but accepts there are time-

consuming steps to take. She hopes Indonesia’s legislators will bring this about by listening to their own people “about corruption in the judicial system”.

“The Jakarta Legal Aid Foundation says the Indonesian legal system is taking away people’s right to life through capital punishment. We know that,” she says.

Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran listened.

Each spoke the language “beautifully” and greatlyvalued Indonesian culture.

“This is what reformation is about, this is why we say these boys are rehabilitated,” she says.

“It’s going to be a long fight and they knew that. 

“But they also were very hopeful that no one else should go through what they and their families went through. I don’t think it was even about them. It was about the grief that they saw in their families and other death row inmates’ families.”