Clive Stafford Smith

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE (born July 9, 1959) is a British lawyer who has practised in the area of civil rights and the death penalty in the United States of America.

Stafford Smith was born in Cambridge and educated at Radley College. He declined a place at the University of Cambridge to move to the United States when he won a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied journalism before enrolling in the Columbia University Law School in New York. He is admitted to practice in the state of Louisiana and in Washington, D.C..

Stafford Smith was awarded the OBE in the New Years' Honours list of 2000 'For humanitarian services in the legal field'. In August 2004 he returned to live in the United Kingdom. He is now the Legal Director of the UK branch of the human rights not-for-profit Reprieve.

1 Death Penalty
2 Guantanamo detainees
3 Comments on the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling
4 References
5 Publications
6 External links

[edit] Death Penalty

Stafford Smith worked for the Southern Prisoners' Defense Committee, now named the Southern Center for Human Rights, and on other campaigns to help convicted defendants sentenced to capital punishment. He first came to British public attention when he appeared in Fourteen Days in May, a 1987 BBC documentary showing the last fortnight in the life of Edward Earl Johnson before he went to the gas chamber in Mississippi State Penitentiary; Stafford Smith acted as Johnson's attorney and was seen desperately trying to halt the execution of the death sentence. In 1993, he helped set up a new justice center, for prisoner advocacy, in New Orleans. He is the legal director of Reprieve, a British charity that is opposed to the death penalty. During his career he has lost six death penalty cases.

[edit] Guantanamo detainees

Beginning in 2002, Stafford Smith has volunteered his services to security detainees at Guantanamo Bay and has assisted in filing lawsuits on behalf of 128 detainees. His clients include Shaker Aamer, Jamil al Banna, Sami Al Hajj, Sami Al Laithi, Abdul Salam Gaithan Mureef Al Shehry, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Jamal Kiyemba, Benyam Mohammed, Hisham Sliti.

It was during this period, in December 2004, that Stafford Smith prepared a 50-page brief for the defense of Saddam Hussein arguing that Saddam should be tried in the U.S. under U.S. criminal law.^[1]

On August 29, 2005 Stafford Smith addressed attendees at the Greenbelt festival, a major UK Christian festival, telling them about the second hunger strike the Guantanamo detainees were undertaking. Stafford Smith warned that prisoners were likely to die soon. Due to restrictions imposed by the United States Department of Defense, 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 been cleared. Thus, Smith had to wait until August 27, 2005 to publicly reveal that the hunger strikes had been re-initiated on August 5, 2005. Two of Stafford Smith's clients, Binyam "Benjamin" Mohammed and Hisham Sliti participated in the hunger strikes.

In an interview broadcast on the BBC television evening news on September 9, 2005, Stafford Smith stated that one of the reasons for the second hunger strike was to protest the continuing imprisonment of children in Guantanamo Bay.

[edit] Comments on the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld ruling

Stafford Smith wrote comments in The Guardian on the US Supreme Court's June 29, 2006 ruling on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.^[2]

Stafford Smith speculated that Bush 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.^[2]

"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 Guantanamo but - for all that Bush bangs on about the importance of personal responsibility - it wanted someone else to take the blame."