Clive Stafford Smith

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith (born 9 July 1959) is a British attorney who specialises in the areas of civil rights and working against the death penalty in the United States of America.

He worked to overturn death sentences for convicts, and helped found the not-for-profit Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans.

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.

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.

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

Formerly named the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, it is now known as the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center (LCAC).

He represented the paedophile Ricky Langley, who was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.

The jurors accepted that the accused was suffering from mental illness, but condemned Langley to capital punishment.

The conviction was reversed, and Stafford Smith facilitated a meeting where Ricky apologised to the mother of his victim, Jeremy Guillory.

Lorilei Guillory asked the DA to drop the death penalty, which he denied.

She testified that Ricky should be in a mental hospital rather than prison, saying "I think he is mentally ill."

By 2002 this was the "largest capital defence organisation in the South."

He was a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, based in Houston, Texas.

In addition, he has represented more than 80 of the detainees held as enemy combatants since 2002 at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp.

As of February 2021, a total of 40 men are still held there.

In 2002, Stafford Smith became a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, a non-profit law office based in Houston, Texas.

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.

After returning to Britain, Stafford Smith worked as the founder of Reprieve, a British non-profit NGO that is opposed to the death penalty.

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.

From 2002 Stafford Smith volunteered his services to detainees held as enemy combatants at the United States detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay, established under President George W. Bush as part of the Global War on Terror.

Stafford Smith has assisted in filing habeas corpus petitions and lawsuits on behalf of scores of detainees.

His clients have included Shaker Aamer, Jamil al Banna, Sami Al Hajj, Sami Al Laithi, Abdul Salam Gaithan Mureef Al Shehry, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Jamal Kiyemba, Binyam Mohammed and Hisham Sliti.

In a BBC interview, when asked why he was representing detainees, Stafford Smith answered that "liberty is eroded at the margins".

In August 2004, Stafford Smith returned from the US to live and work in the United Kingdom.

He is the co-founder of Reprieve, a human rights not-for-profit organisation.

He left after 15 years, and has now established a new non-profit called 3DCentre.

He returned to Britain in August 2004.

That December he prepared a 50-page brief outlining a possible defences against execution for Saddam Hussein, arguing that the former dictator should be tried in the Hague under international law.

In 2005 he received the Gandhi International Peace Award.

Born in Cambridge and educated at Old Buckenham Hall School and Radley College, Clive Stafford Smith studied journalism as a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

He followed this degree with another in law at Columbia University in New York.

He is licensed to practise law in the state of Louisiana.

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.

On 29 August 2005, Stafford Smith addressed attendees at the Greenbelt festival, a major UK Christian festival, telling them about the second hunger strike at Guantanamo.

He warned the audience that prisoners were likely to die very soon.

Due to restrictions imposed by the Pentagon (DOD), lawyers' notes must be filed with an intelligence clearing house in Virginia, before release.

Conversations with clients are considered classified, and cannot be discussed until they have full clearance.

Smith had to wait until 27 August 2005 to publicly reveal that the hunger strikes had started again on 5 August 2005.