Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2007

horribly” on a platform of unilateral nuclear disarmament.

“Even then he was very interested in social justice,” recalls Doris Betts ’ 55, professor emerita of English and comparative literature, who later helped arrange a nontraditional Morehead internship at Team Defense Project Inc. in Atlanta.“He had a real sense of idealism. As a professor, you can tell some people are going to do something important in the world, and I knew that about Clive.”

Stafford Smith was among the first group of students Peter Kaufman taught in religious studies at Chapel Hill.

“I was greeted in 1978 by students who were brighter than I was,” Kaufman said. “We would do seminars, and they would virtually teach themselves — I’d start class standing up, but by the end I’d be sitting down in awe. As for Clive, even then he was frank and forthright, so the fact that he’s picked up the case of the forgotten doesn’t surprise me. What does surprise me is that a society which doesn’t value candor has listened to him. He’s got something that makes people take notice.”

After his freshman year, Stafford Smith took his first Morehead internship in Los Angeles, in the sheriff’s department. “With cops like that, you didn’t need criminals,” he recalls of those 10 weeks. “I was horrified at the violence and corruption, and I got into a furious argument with a cop who ultimately did me a great favor by telling me I should work for this place in Atlanta, and I did.

“That Team Defense internship was very useful in terms of amassing experience. I spent a few weeks in the office, but they deemed me young with nothing to contribute and sent me to Reedsville (Ga.) to visit death row prisoners every day. What a great experience. I went back six months later, by which time they’d moved death row to Jackson. I talked to the inmates about everything; one even advised me, ‘If you ever get into trouble with your mother-in-law, just burn her house down. That’s what I did.’Another called Johnny was one of 30 kids [in his family], and I was the first person he’d met outside of the prison in years. It was tremendously affirming.”

Although Stafford Smith had started college thinking he’d major in journalism and write “a few great articles on the death penalty,” his plans changed abruptly when he learned that death row convicts had no