Clive Stafford Smith has spent 25 years representing defendants facing the death penalty in the US. Now he has returned to the UK and turned his attention on Guantanamo Bay. Anita Rice reports


Clive Stafford Smith is pretty chipper when meeting the Gazette at the private club he has nominated – after explaining, somewhat embarrassed, that he is an honorary member – as the venue for this interview. The British government has just requested the return of five British residents from Guantanamo Bay, having previously refused to intervene because they were not UK passport holders.



‘It’s fantastic,’ he says. ‘The current administration can’t come out and say “We had a problem before, and the problem was John Reid and Tony Blair”. It is trying to act like it is a result of an American shift. It’s not. It’s a result of a British shift. We’ll have to see where it goes but it’s my “be nice to the government week”.’



Being ‘nice to the government’ is not something the 48-year-old human rights lawyer and founder of legal charity Reprieve is famed for, having acted for some of the most reviled people on the planet – killers on death row and terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay.



Mr Stafford Smith was brought up in England but has dual US/UK citizenship. He became obsessed with capital punishment – or rather its abolition – after writing an essay on the subject at Radley College public school. After rejecting a place at Cambridge, he studied in the US, originally intending to train as a journalist before changing to law. ‘There are other ways of sinking even lower in the public’s estimation,’ he notes with a smile.



He has courted controversy – and taken considerable flak for it – ever since. John Sinquefield, an assistant district attorney in Louisiana, has clashed frequently with Mr Stafford Smith in court. He is quoted as saying that not only has Mr Stafford Smith chosen to use his talents to represent ‘very evil people’, but that his courtroom tactics ‘do damage to victims and victims’ families’.



Mr Stafford Smith robustly denies both charges, saying: ‘I put whatever limited talents I have to defend people who are hated.’ Has he ever doubted what he has achieved? Only, he says, if he has failed in court. ‘There is nothing worse in life than listening to a jury sentence someone to death… 12 people could have made the right decision… instead they do that, and that is hard.’



As for damaging courtroom tactics, he points out that, apart from anything else, it is quite simply poor strategy to treat victims or their families badly in court. ‘I talk to the victim’s family in every case – the fact that you’re opposed to the death penalty doesn’t mean you’re in favour of these poor victims being abused,’ he says.



‘I do not mean this as a personal issue with John Sinquefield, but prosecutors do far more harm to victims by constantly filling them up with all this hatred. I’ve never yet seen a victim who has had a cathartic experience… because of the death penalty. What it does is fill them with this venom that makes their lives so much harder to get through.’



He then launches into a story about Lorelei Guillory, who may soon be the subject of a BBC film, whose six-year-old son was murdered by one of her clients, Ricky Langley. Ms Guillory visited Langley in prison and ended up testifying for Mr Stafford Smith.



He says: ‘I asked her one question in court: “Do you have an opinion as to whether that guy over there, who killed your son, was mentally ill?” Her response was this: “Yes, as a matter of fact I do. I think that Ricky Langley has been crying out for help since the day he was born and, for whatever reason, his family, society and the legal system has never listened to him. As I sit on this witness chair, I can hear the death throes of my child, but at the same time I can hear that man crying out for help and yes, I think he was mentally ill when he did it.”



‘That to me is incredible compassion. And when we think about what we try to encourage people in our world to do, are we trying to encourage them to be compassionate like Lorelei Guillory or vengeful? I know what the answer is. We all know what the answer is.’



That may be, but US public opinion is not on his side. More than 1,000 people have been executed since the reintroduction of capital punishment in 1976. A Gallup poll earlier this year suggests that 65% of Americans back capital punishment for convicted murderers. The Bush administration wants to speed up executions by removing several layers of appeals.



Opponents say he is out of touch, but Mr Stafford Smith asserts that the death penalty is nothing but the politics of hatred. He illustrates his point by recounting how an 18-year-old accused of murder awaiting trial in a Louisiana jail was the subject of a ‘shock-jock’ radio phone-in. Callers were nominating which body part should be ripped off him that day.



‘The degree to which people are willing to hate someone they have never met, who is presumed innocent, to the extent that they talk about ripping body parts off – that is the distillation of hatred and that is what the death penalty is all about,’ he says. ‘It is a superior attitude where we look at someone and say “you are inferior and do not have the right to live”. I just think that attitude is reprehensible and it is used by government to distract people from the real issues, as if executing someone is going to make the world a better place.’



So how to convince a reluctant public that nobody is beyond the pale? Consider, says Mr Stafford Smith, the most despicable thing that you have ever done and imagine it was the only thing that anyone knew about you and that you were to be judged on it.



‘We’ve all done something bad – but we’re all better than our worst 15 minutes,’ he says. ‘That’s why I like doing death penalty cases because half the trial is about what happened to someone. It is not about whether you did something – it is about why that happened. The frailties of humankind are fascinating. I don’t want to be sentimental because I have my own.’



Unlike in the UK, US prosecutors are elected and so promises to be tough on criminals tend to go down well with voters. Mr Stafford Smith says the system is not weighted to either ensuring the right person is locked up or exonerating people once a mistake has been made.



He says: ‘What is our goal as a prosecutor? Is our goal to get as many people in prison as possible, in which case they are very good at it, or is our goal to get the right people in prison, in which case they are not very good at it.’



Equally scathing about life without parole – ‘also disgusting’ – Mr Stafford Smith often stands accused of being a ‘bleeding heart’ liberal, attracting criticism for claiming many of his clients were mentally ill. With a trace of annoyance, he says: ‘I’m not willing to make a sweeping statement that everybody who has committed a crime has got a mental illness, because the sanest of people are capable of committing murder. Everyone is. But, on the other hand, I think a huge number of things currently defined as “evil” are the fruits of mental illness.’



Having spent years defending people regarded by many as beyond redemption, he has now turned his attentions to campaigning for prisoners – he declines to use the term ‘detainees’ – held at Guantanamo Bay. He and a group of other lawyers sued the US government to provide prisoners with some, albeit limited, legal representation. He has defended more than 60 inmates – including the British former captive Moazzam Begg and the five British residents still incarcerated there.



In terms of representing ‘the hated’, Guantanamo has plumbed new depths for Mr Stafford Smith. His disappointment with the previous UK leadership’s response to Guantanamo and the ‘War on Terror’ – another term he refuses to use – is clear: ‘What has either Guantanamo or Belmarsh done for the security of America or Britain? What have they done to exacerbate hostilities between Muslims and non-Muslims? It’s obvious, and you’re just left wondering why it is not obvious to George Bush and Tony Blair.’



Recurrent proposals to introduce 90 days’ detention without charge for terror suspects are, he says, ‘simply absurd’. He adds that the government’s job is not to prevent hypothetical crime from possibly happening, but to make society safe – something he insists cannot be achieved by ‘antagonising a large number of people and turning them into enemies’. The government has, he says, ‘a lot to answer for’.




Mr Stafford Smith is talking about getting round to qualifying to practise in the UK – time permitting. He thinks Britain, and Europe, will be increasingly important in terms of litigation on torture in the future.


‘Britain does tend to respect the conventions on torture, as Pinochet found to his cost,’ he says. ‘Europe is the place where all these torturers are going to end up being prosecuted.’ Mr Stafford Smith believes Guantanamo will be closed within a year – one cannot help but sense that this veteran campaigner is eyeing up his next challenge.



l Clive Stafford Smith’s book, Guantanamo Bay and the Secret Prisons, is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson



Executions worldwide 2006

l China: 1,010+

l Iran: 177

l Pakistan: 82

l Iraq: 65+

l Sudan: 65+

l USA: 53

l Saudi Arabia: 39+

l Yemen: 30+

l Vietnam: 14

l Kuwait: 10+



Source: Amnesty International
Note: + indicates the actual figure may be higher





Biography:

l Born near Newmarket, Suffolk in 1959.

l Left Radley College with ten O Levels and four A Levels before studying at the University of North Carolina and Columbia University, New York. Took bar exams in Louisiana.

l Spent nine years as a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights before launching the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, a non-profit law office representing poor people in death penalty cases.

l Founded Reprieve, a charity campaigning against the death penalty in 1999.

l Awarded an OBE for humanitarian services in 2000.


l Returned to the UK in 2004 to become Reprieve’s legal director, now also representing prisoners held on Guantanamo Bay.