CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH ’ 81
IAN ROBINS
‘Twenty years
in the belly
of the beast is
a long time —
it was a very
hate-filled world
in many ways.
The death
penalty is the
distillation
of hatred:
We decide that
we hate someone
enough to want
to kill them.
England is a
gentler nation.’
Clive Stafford Smith
right to a lawyer. He watched Team
Defense staff and volunteers work tirelessly
to battle this injustice and realized their
nonprofit law firm simply couldn’t get the
lawyers it needed, so he applied to Columbia Law School and got a full scholarship.
Unencumbered by debt, Stafford Smith
graduated from Columbia and went to
work for the Southern Prisoners’ Defense
Committee (now the Southern Center for
Human Rights) in Atlanta. “A dozen of my
Columbia friends [in a class of 313] sadly
confessed they had to sign up to a corporate law firm to pay off their loans rather
than fulfill their dream of delivering justice,” Stafford Smith told an audience
attending his Longford Trust lecture in
London last autumn. “They promised to
return to their dreams as soon as they
could; none ever did.”
Not everyone misses him
But Stafford Smith never veered off
course, and in 1993 he moved to New
Orleans to set up the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center (now the Louisiana Capital
Assistance Center). Six years later, the same
year he became a U.S. citizen, he set up
Reprieve U.K., another anti-death penalty
charity, in London. And in 2004, after 26
years in America, Stafford Smith and his
wife, Emily Bolton, also a death penalty
attorney, decided it was time to go home.
“Twenty years in the belly of the beast
is a long time — it was a very hate-filled
world in many ways. The death penalty is
the distillation of hatred: We decide that we
hate someone enough to want to kill
them. England is a gentler nation.”
Certainly not everyone has missed
Stafford Smith’s outspoken presence in the
U.S. Polls show that nearly two thirds of
Americans support the death penalty for
convicted murderers. Between 1976 (when
the U.S. reinstated the death penalty) and
September 2007, U.S. judges have allowed
1,095 people (a third of them in Texas
alone) to be executed, including 40 in the
first nine months of this year.
John Sinquefield, East Baton Rouge
Parish first assistant district attorney, clashed
often with Stafford Smith and calls his values
misplaced. “I think someone as intelligent
and talented as Clive Stafford Smith has
wasted his talents to protect the monsters of
our society. He’s a liberal left-wing lawyer in
the minority in Louisiana and the U.S.A.
with his views, and so we hit a philosophical
roadblock. I once asked him, ‘Imagine Hitler
were walking around and killing a million
people, should he receive the death penalty?’
And his answer was, ‘No,’ but that’s not how
most Americans think; there are some people who commit such heinous crimes that
Stafford Smith’s
unadorned office features a world map,
dotted with red to
show where the men
in Guantanamo come
from, and a framed
letter from the mother of a 6-year-old boy
who was murdered
by one of Stafford
Smith’s clinically
insane clients. The
mother argued
against the death
penalty.
