Sultana Noon, Reprieve Fellow, Pakistan
 Sultana studied social psychology and political science at Bennington College where she did extensive research on capital punishment in Islam. As a student at Bennington College, Sultana completed an internship at the Federal Defender Program, Inc. in Atlanta, GA where she assisted in juror interviews. After her graduation in 2005, Sultana worked at the Center for Capital Assitance in San Francisco, CA where she worked on federal and state death penalty cases out of Southern California, Texas and Montana.
Sultana is utilizing her Reprieve fellowship to investigate, and expose the network of illegal secret prisons that are being created by the US, to gather evidence for litigating and challenging such practices in European and other international courts and to investigate selected death penalty cases in the region. Lawyers at Reprieve also represent prisoners in Guantánamo who are from Pakistan, and Sultana is going to investigate these cases so that litigation to challenge such practices can be commenced.
The first time I met with Faisal, we talked for almost two hours. He sat inside his cell and talked to me through the bar door. I expected him to ask me a lot of questions to verify my identity as clients who have been let down by the law have no reason to trust anyone who claims to be working for their best interest. I thought that building a relationship of trust would probably take a few visits till he realizes that I drive four hours to meet with him, then wait for a couple of hours at the jail for the guards to take me to his cell and then drive back home for another four hours. To my pleasant surprise, Faisal opened up to me during our very first meeting. In fact, it was more of a one way conversation as Faisal simply poured his heart out. When the guards who were waiting on me finally got tired and told me it was time for me to leave, Faisal thanked me for visiting him and said “this is the first time in my life that somebody has actually listened to me.”
His words filled me with a sense of responsibility and made me realize how important the work is that I am doing in Pakistan. Faisal is one example of the thousands of prisoners on death row who consider themselves lucky if their lawyers have the time to visit them. Many don’t even get family visits because their families are so ashamed of knowing someone in prison that they simply disown them. Like death row anywhere else in the world, here the prisoners are either forgotten or hated and judged by the society as the worst of the worst. My task is to ensure that this changes by raising awareness and assisting clients with their cases in the best possible way.
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