Clive Stafford Smith
| Clive Stafford Smith | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
Clive Stafford Smith 9 July 1959 Cambridge, United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater |
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Columbia University |
| Occupation | Lawyer |
Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE (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, helping found the not-for-profit Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans, which by 2002 was the "largest capital defence organisation in the South." He was a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, based in Houston. He has represented more than 100 of the detainees held as enemy combatants since 2002 at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp. As of April 2016, a total of 80 men are still held there.
In August 2004, Stafford Smith returned from the US to live and work in the United Kingdom. He is the Legal Director of the UK branch of Reprieve, a human rights not-for-profit organisation. 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 declined a place at the University of Cambridge to study as a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill reading journalism. He followed a degree with another, this time in law at Columbia University in New York. He is licensed to practise law in the state of Louisiana and in Washington, D.C..
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. He first came to British public attention when he appeared in Fourteen Days in May (1987), a BBC documentary showing the last fortnight in the life of Edward Earl Johnson before his execution in Mississippi State Penitentiary. Stafford Smith had acted as Johnson's attorney and was seen desperately trying to halt the execution of the death sentence. In a follow-up documentary, Stafford Smith conducted his own investigation into the murder case for which Johnson was executed.
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