Clive Stafford Smith lives just outside Bridport in Dorset. He is a human rights lawyer and award winning author. His raison detre is to help those who have been locked up receive actual justice as opposed to the type usually dished out.
Having worked for the Southern Prisoners’ Defense Committee, based in Atlanta, Georgia, now known as the Southern Center for Human Rights, and on other campaigns to help convicted defendants sentenced to capital punishment he then in 1993 helped set up a new justice centre for prisoner advocacy in New Orleans. In 2002, Clive became a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, a non-profit law office based in Houston, Texas.
Since returning to Britain in 2004, Clive has founded Reprieve, a British non-profit NGO that is opposed to the death penalty.
During his career in the US, by 2002 Clive had lost appeals in four death penalty cases, but had won nearly 300, earning reprieves from execution for those convicts.
From 2002 Clive volunteered his services to detainees held as enemy combatants at the United States detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay in which he discusses in his memoir, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (2007).
He has his own Wikipedia page although he himself claims that at one point it had his birth date as ‘1919’.
I interviewed Clive for the series Ten By Six in which our focus was on how the US and UK criminal justice systems could be made fit for public purpose. A fascinating interview from beginning to end, in it he makes a stunning revelation. Personally I am still reeling. I was entirely unaware that the UK justice system did this to innocent people who had previously been found guilty.
Hopefully I will be able to interview Clive again and again regarding his experiences of working closely with people on death row and with people who have been locked up without trial.
Watch this space.
Jason Cridland
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