Clive Stafford Smith

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Clive Stafford Smith OBE
Stafford Smith in 2010
Born	Clive Stafford Smith (1959-07-09) 9 July 1959 (age 64) Cambridge, United Kingdom
Nationality	British
Alma mater	University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Columbia University
Occupation	Lawyer

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith

Stafford Smith worked for the Southern Prisoners' Defense Committee, based in Atlanta, now known as the Southern Center for Human Rights, and on other campaigns to help convicted defendants sentenced to capital punishment.^[4] He was featured in Fourteen Days in May (1987), a documentary showing the fortnight prior to the execution of Edward Earl Johnson in Mississippi State Penitentiary.^[5] It was aired on the BBC. Stafford Smith had acted as Johnson's attorney and was seen trying to halt the execution. In a follow-up documentary, Stafford Smith conducted his own investigation into the murder case for which Johnson had been executed.^[5]

In 1993, he helped set up a new justice center for prisoner advocacy in

In 2002, Stafford Smith became a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, a non-profit law office based in Houston, Texas.^[7] It was designed to bring his legal methods developed at LCAC into the "capital of capital punishment", as Texas had the highest number of executions in the United States.

Guantánamo detainees

After returning to Britain, Stafford Smith worked as the founder of Reprieve, a British non-profit NGO that is opposed to the death penalty.^[4] During his career in the US, by 2002 Stafford Smith had lost appeals in six death penalty cases, but had won nearly 300, earning reprieves from execution for those convicts and exonerating a number of them.^[2]

From 2002 Stafford Smith volunteered his services to detainees held as enemy combatants at the United States detainment camp at

should have been secretly relieved that the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, who supported the administration's appeal against the lower court's ruling, were in the minority. He wrote:

In the end, I suspect there was a collective sigh of relief from the White House that the lunatic fringe did not prevail. The Bush administration has finally recognized that it must close Guantánamo but—for all that Bush bangs on about the importance of personal responsibility—it wanted someone else to take the blame.[11]

Stafford Smith published a memoir about his experiences at Guantanamo, Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the

Secret Prisons (2007). It was shortlisted for the 2008 Orwell Prize for political writing.^[12] Interviewed by Jon Snow of Channel 4 News on 26 March 2009, Stafford Smith said about the treatment of detainees, "I would go one step further: the torture decisions were being made in the White House, by the National Security Council, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice." He asserted that although the British had not carried out the torture, they were complicit in it. Stafford Smith concluded that, in trying to keep the torture allegations secret, the US authorities were "confusing national security with national embarrassment".^[13]

In July 2010, Stafford Smith accused former Foreign Secretary David Miliband of fighting to prevent the release of vital documents during the Binyam Mohamed case.^{[citation needed]} On 9 June 2015, he told an audience that he had visited the facility 34 times.^[6] In 2013, he went on hunger strike as part of a campaign for the release of Guantanamo detainee Shaker Aamer, who was finally released in 2015.^[14]

In 2022, Stafford Smith was featured in the documentary film We Are Not Ghouls, about his work with JAG attorney Yvonne Bradley to free Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.

Awards

This section of a poorly sourced must be removed immediately from the article and its talk page, especially if potentially libelous. Find sources: "Clive Stafford Smith" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (August 2022) (Learn how and when to remove this message )

• Appointed
  Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2000 New Years' Honours list "for humanitarian services in the legal field"^[15]
• Honorary Doctorate of Law by the University of Wolverhampton 2001, for his work fighting the death penalty in America ^{[citation needed]}
• Lifetime Achievement Award from The Lawyer Magazine (2003) ^{[citation needed]}
• Benjamin Smith Award from the ACLU of Louisiana (2003) ^{[citation needed]}
• Soros Senior Fellow, Rowntree Visionary (2005) ^{[citation needed]}
• Guantanamo detainees and campaigning against extraordinary rendition.^[16]
• Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Award (2008) ^[citation needed]
• International Freedom of the Press Award (2009)^{[citation needed]}
• International Bar Association's Human Rights Award (2010)^{[citation needed]}
• Honorary Doctorate by Bournemouth University (2011)^{[citation needed]}
• Honorary Degree (Doctor of Laws) by University of Bath (2011)^[17]

Publications

• Welcome To Hell: Letters and Writings from Death Row, edited by
  ISBN 1-55553-636-0
• The Eight O'Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Fighting the Lawless World of Guantanamo Bay (Nation, 2007)
  ISBN 1-56858-374-5
• Bad Men: Guantánamo Bay and the Secret Prisons (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2007). Details his work for detainees in Guantanamo Bay, and criticises advocates of torture.
• Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America (Harvill Secker, 2012)
  ISBN 9781846556258

References

1. ^ Knight of the living dead Archived 4 May 2018 at the Wayback Machine The Daily Telegraph – 30 January 2005
2. ^ ^{a b} "The Great Defender" Archived 30 June 2006 at the Wayback Machine, BBC News, 11 March 2002. Retrieved 22 April 2016
3. ^ "Who's still held at Guantánamo". The Miami Herald. Archived from the original on 7 February 2019. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
4. ^ ^{a b c d} "Profile at Reprieve". Archived from the original on 1 October 2015. Retrieved 24 October 2015.
5. ^ ^{a b} "Fourteen Days in May". Archived from the original on 10 August 2011. Retrieved 4 July 2011.
6. ^ ^{a b} "My father, mental illness and the death penalty | Clive Stafford Smith | TEDxExeter - YouTube". YouTube. Archived from the original on 15 January 2017. Retrieved 14 December 2016.
7. ^ Funding reprieve from Death Row, archived from the original on 21 December 2016, retrieved 14 December 2016
8. ^ "Insight with Clive Stafford-Smith – Defending Terror Suspects of Guantanamo", Frontline, 15 August 2007, archived from the original on 21 December 2021, retrieved 14 December 2016
9. ^ "Saddam bids to challenge case in U.S.", The Sunday Times, 19 December 2004, archived from the original on 8 August 2008, retrieved 14 December 2016
10. ^ "A Child at Guantanamo: The Unending Torment of Mohamed Jawad", Andy Worthington website, 1 June 2009, archived from the original on 21 October 2011, retrieved 14 December 2016
11. ^ ^{a b} "A good day for democracy: The ruling against the Guantanamo tribunals is good news for everyone — even George Bush" Archived 20 April 2013 at archive.today, The Guardian, 30 June 2006.
12. ^ "Shortlist 2008" Archived 14 March 2008 at the Wayback Machine, The Orwell Prize
13. ^ "Interview: Mohammed's lawyer Clive Stafford Smith". Channel 4 News. 26 March 2009. Archived from the original on 8 April 2009. Retrieved 28 March 2009.
14. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived
    from the original on 7 February 2019. Retrieved 6 February 2019.
15. ^ "Supplement 55710". The London Gazette. 30 December 1999. p. 35. Archived from the original on 29 March 2017. Retrieved 21 March 2017.
16. ^ "Gandhi International Peace Award citation". Gandhi Foundation. Archived from the original on 2 August 2008. Retrieved 21 October 2008.
17. ^ "Honorary Graduates 1989 to present". bath.ac.uk. University of Bath. Archived from the original on 17 July 2010. Retrieved 18 February 2012.

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Clive Stafford Smith.

• Reprieve UK – Stafford Smith is Legal Director
• "The Great Defender", BBC News, 11 March 2002
• "Do Non-Americans Have Human Rights?", an interview in Mother Jones, 23 February 2005
• Vikram Dodd (10 August 2007). "Clive is used to the US way, where people play things to the media. Maybe with Guantánamo that's what you need". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 11 August 2007.
• "Clive Stafford Smith: US Holding 27,000 in Secret Overseas Prisons," Democracy Now! 19 May 2008
• Appearances on C-SPAN