The British grandmother sentenced to death in Indonesia who could not afford to finance an appeal will have lawyers paid by donations from a Just Giving page and members of the British public, the Huffington Post has learnt.
As of Friday, Lindsay Sandiford was still unrepresented with days left to appeal her death sentence on drugs charges last week, after she lost her legal attempt, through British charity Reprieve, to ensure the Foreign Office supported her appeal.
Hilary Parsons with her sister Lindsay Sandiford
Having exhausted her family’s finances to pay for a trial lawyer, Sandiford had no money to pay for an appeal – which involves filing a complicated legal document in Indonesian, a language she does not speak, by February 12.
A lawyer has agreed to act for the family without charge, but Sandiford could not even afford his expenses of £2,500.
James Cartwright, 48, from Nottinghamshire, told HuffPost UK he had heard about Sandiford's appeal on BBC Radio 5Live and thought the amount was so small, it could easily be raised in donations.
"I heard about it on the news, and I did feel for her very much, but it wasn't until I heard about how much she was suing the government for, £2,500 that I thought, this is such a piddly amount of money, it's absurd.
"People were ringing into the 5Live phone-in saying, why doesn't the government just pay up?
"And I thought, well, if the government doesn't pay up we'll have a bit of a whip-round, and the good old British people will pay. And that's exactly what's happened. The government refused to pay, but in three or four days we've raised enough to pay for her appeal.
"The money is going through Reprieve, they have said they will make sure the money goes to pay the lawyer in Indonesia. They have already let the family know that money has been raised to prepare the appeal. It's a done deal."
Reprieve told HuffPost UK it had received other large donations, as well as the donations from the Just Giving page, to help pay for the appeal, and any subsequent legal action should Sandiford fail at the first appeal.
James Cartwright, who began the fundraising site to save Sandiford
Cartwright, an IT manager, said he had no connection to the case and was just "an ordinary guy in the street" trying to be proactive. He has not heard from Sandiford's family, but said he did not want recognition.
"If anything, the thanks should go to the ordinary British people who raised the money.
"If I was wealthy, I would have just written a cheque myself. I can't afford £2,500 but it's not much in the scheme of things. I can afford some, other people can too.
"We got some very big single donations and many, many small ones."
Some on the Just Giving site have donated up to £200.
Cartwright said that he was "anti-death penalty" which had spurred him to raise the money. "I think it's abhorrant that people think taking someone's life is OK, even as a deterrent.
"She's a woman, a British citizen alone in a foreign country, who might have been blackmailed or coerced. I feel what she did was wrong, but it seems completely and utterly out of proportion."
Reprieve's Donald Campbell told HuffPost UK: "Lindsay Sandiford has enough for this stage of her appeal, and it's fantastic to see the British people come forward to take action where the British government wouldn't.
"All the money came to us unsolicited and will be used for the case."
Sandiford currently faces death by firing squad for attempting to smuggle £1.7m cocaine. Prosecution lawyers asked for her to serve a 15-year sentence, but a panel of judges, headed by Amser Simanjuntak, concluded that Sandiford had damaged the image of Bali as a tourism destination and weakened the government's programme of drug annihilation. She was therefore sentenced to death.