Carolina Alumni Review - November/December 2007

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH ’ 81

‘He’s not always
correct in what
he argues. People
are impressed
more with his

accent than with
what he says.
He has a cause
and is willing
to do anything
for it. I can’t say
what I want
to say about him
because, knowing
Clive, I’d end
up in court.
He threatened
to sue me before.’

the only option for them is death.”

Marvin “Sonny” White Jr., assistant attorney general for Mississippi, opposed Stafford Smith in many cases. He says little about his long, adversarial relationship with the humanitarian. “He’s not always correct in what he argues,” White finally offered. “People are impressed more with his accent than with what he says. He has a cause and is willing to do anything for it. I can’t say what I want to say about him because, knowing Clive, I’d end up in court. He threatened to sue me before.”

That threat came during the hostile appeal of Edward Earl Johnson, convicted of murder and assault and executed in May 1987, a case that the BBC chronicled in 14 Days in May. Later shown in the U.S., in abbreviated format on HBO, the documentary depicts Stafford Smith desperately pleading for Johnson’s life. It was the first execution the young lawyer had witnessed.

“I view this case as a great example of my fallibility,” Stafford Smith somberly told BBC Radio recently. “One of my clients who was killed was innocent. I followed Edward into the gas chamber, and that memory haunts me to this day.”

Marvin ‘Sonny’
White Jr.
assistant attorney
general for Mississippi

‘What I do isn’t work’

April 2007, Bridport, England. Some 5,000 miles from Guantanamo and the South’s execution chambers, Clive Stafford Smith is writing in his unmarked office, tucked above an estate agency just yards from the center of this historic Dorset market town. Dressed in fraying gray cords and a gray top, he reflexively steps over his slumbering, aged golden retriever mixed with Irish setter and Afghan hound (“a representative of terrorist states,” he says wryly) to greet me.

He’s a soft-spoken man with a penetrating gaze, relaxed despite routine 90-hour workweeks and travels that have taken him away for all but 15 days this year; his sense of humor, cricket, long walks and bad movies help keep him in check.

No gilded certificates or awards hang in his office to advertise his accomplishments, only a large world map dotted with red to show where the men in Guantanamo come from and a framed letter from Lorilei Guillory. Guillory, Stafford Smith tells me, is the mother of a 6-year-old boy murdered by one of his clinically insane clients, Ricky Langley. She came to understand

IAN ROBINS

Langley’s mental illness and argued before a jury that he should be institutionalized, not executed. For her mercy, she is one of Stafford Smith’s greatest heroes, of which he seems to have many.

“What I do isn’t work — it’s fun. The joy corporate lawyers get is in the pro bono work they do on the side; I get to do that all the time. There are plenty more capital cases around the world, in Vietnam, Malaysia and some 14,000 people held in secret U.S. prisons — Guantanamo Bay is just a small distraction. So although I’d like to think that one day I’d be out of a job, that’s not very likely.”

Back in England, Stafford Smith has not slowed down, still putting in 90- hour workweeks and traveling all but 15 days of the past year. He says that for corporate lawyers, the joys come in occasional pro bono work — which he gets to do full time.