Condemned Murderer Endorses Obama

Mississippi death row inmate Dale Leo Bishop’s final words before being executed included an endorsement of presidential contender Senator Obama.

“Senator Obama offers hope for people like me,” Bishop asserted. “I have feelings, dreams, and aspirations. I don’t want to die.”

Bishop acknowledged that the election of Obama would come too late to save him, but still urged voters “to consider what kind of a world they want for their children. Do we really want a justice system focused on ‘an-eye-for-an-eye?’ Or do we want to ‘forgive-and-forget?’ Think about that when you cast your ballots next November.”

Senator Obama averred that “there is wisdom in what Mr. Bishop said” and vowed to “change our thinking about what constitutes justice.”

“Mr. Bishop is just one of a multitude of victims of an oppressive economic system that forces people into ‘wage slavery,’” Obama contended. “When I am president I will initiate programs to fill the ‘love gap’ that exists for so many of these unfortunates. They can know that they will be nurtured and provided for by an Obama Administration. They will have no need to commit crimes. This is my promise to the American people.”

Bishop was executed at the Mississippi State Penitentiary on July 23 for his role in beating Marcus James Gentry to death with a hammer in 1998.

human rights organization, Reprieve notes:

the chance that Barbour, a long-time right-wing political hack and backroom fixer, will actually commute Bishop’s sentence or even delay his killing are slim. For one thing, Bishop is white — or “white trash” as he’d be called amongst Barbour’s neo-plantation set — and his death could help redress the statistical imbalance between the executions of black and white prisoners

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Reprieve was founded by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith in 1999. Reprieve has nine full-time staff working in its London office, and supports eight full-time Fellows working in the field in the Deep Southern United States.

Paul Hamann, Chair and Trustee

Paul is one of the founders of Reprieve. He runs his own independent production company, Wild Pictures, and was previously the BBC’s Head of Documentaries and History.

Martha Lane Fox, Trustee

Martha co-founded lastminute.com in 1998,
Martha acted as Group Managing Director
Martha is a non-executive Director of Channel 4 Television, Patron of CAMFED www.camfed.org. and the Prisons Video Trust, and co-founder of Lucky Voice Private Karaoke.

Jo Martin, Trustee

Jo studied law at King’s College London, graduating in 2000. Between January and May 2002 she worked as a Reprieve Volunteer at the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center in New Orleans, assisting with the cases of defendants facing the death penalty. She joined the Reprieve Board in the summer of 2002, becoming a Trustee in May 2007. She works as a solicitor specialising in employment and discrimination law at Soho-based firm Simons Muirhead & Burton.

Sultana Noon, Reprieve Fellow, Pakistan

Sultana studied social psychology and political science at Bennington College where she did extensive research on capital punishment in Islam.

Patrick Mulvaney, Reprieve Fellow 2008-9

Patrick Mulvaney studied journalism at New York University before attending the University of Pennsylvania Law School. He also worked for a year at the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty tracking executions and organizing opposition to capital punishment, and for a year at The Nation magazine

Patrick has interned at the Southern Center for Human Rights, assisting with death penalty litigation, and at Reprieve in London, working on Guantánamo Bay and death penalty issues.

Christine DeMaso, Reprieve Fellow 2007-8

Christine DeMaso graduated from Columbia Law School in 2007. While in law school she interned at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem and with the Southern Center for Human Rights. She also served as an Articles Editor on the Columbia Law Review.

Terrica Redfield, Reprieve Fellow 2006 - 2007

Terrica Redfield is a 2002 graduate of the University of Virginia School of Law. While a law student, Terrica interned with the Virginia Capital Representation Resource Center where she was confronted by the injustice inherent in the U.S system of capital punishment. As an African-American and native of Mississippi, she was particularly struck by the ways racism affected such life and death decisions, especially in the Southern US.

Alma Lagarda, Reprieve Fellow 2006 - 7

Alma Lagarda graduated from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005, where she was a member of Boalt Hall’s Death Penalty Clinic and served as co-editor in chief of the Berkeley La Raza Law Journal

Eleni Antonopoulos, Reprieve Fellow 2006 - 8
Eleni Antonopoulos used her fellowship at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center (LCAC)

In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Eleni took over as lead investigator at LCAC. Eleni was also a key member of the team of lawyers and investigators who worked day and night to secure the release of the seven thousand prisoners who were in Orleans Parish prison when the hurricane hit New Orleans

Caroline Meyer, Reprieve Fellow 2005 - 6

Caroline Meyer graduated from law school in Toronto, Canada, and worked for one year as a Reprieve fellow in Harris County Texas, at the Gulf Region Advocacy Center (GRACE).

Caroline also worked to build a partnership between GRACE and the historically black Thurgood Marshall School of Law, as well as other local schools, to bring students from racial minorities into the capital defence community.

Barry Gerharz, Reprieve Fellow 2004 - 5

Barry Gerharz attended Brooklyn and Tulane Law Schools, and volunteered at Innocence Project New Orleans before joining the staff as a Reprieve Fellow upon graduation. Barry used his Reprieve Fellowship to initiate a project to help wrongfully convicted prisoners upon release as an ‘Exoneree Advocate.’

Richard Bourke, Senior Fellow

Richard Bourke graduated in law from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He worked as a youth worker, solicitor and then as highly successful criminal defence barrister in Australia before he came to Louisiana

Jonny Kerr, Reprieve Investigator

Jonny is from Northern Ireland and studied law at Queens University in Belfast. An interest in human rights led Jonny to a volunteer placement in Houston with the Texas Defender Service where he saw first hand the injustice of the death penalty. Jonny returned to Houston to work as a Reprieve investigator on the case of Linda Carty. Linda holds British citizenship and is originally from the Caribbean.

Shauneen Lambe, Reprieve Investigator

Shauneen graduated from the University of Edinburgh and is qualified as a barrister in the UK and as an attorney in Louisiana. She is a founding member of Reprieve and served on the Board as a Trustee and advisor. Shauneen worked as an investigator and attorney at the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center in New Orleans on the case of Ryan Matthews.

Amanda Telfer, Reprieve Investigator

Amanda Telfer studied Mathematics and Philosophy at Manchester University, then worked in the entertainment/music field for several years. Amanda next undertook a law conversion course and worked for 10 years in civil litigation in intellectual property. Inspired by the documentary ‘Fourteen Days in May,’ Amanda volunteered at Reprieve, working first on managing performances of the theatre production Lorilei in London and Edinburgh, and then as an investigator for the case of Neil Revill, a British National awaiting trial for double murder in California

Clemmie Harrison, Reprieve Investigator

Clemmie Harrison is a graduate of Nottingham University, with a BA in politics. She spent several months as a Reprieve Volunteer at the Louisiana Capital Assistance Center (LCAC) focusing on investigation and the co-ordination of a client welfare programme. As a Reprieve investigator, Clemmie spent the initial part of 2007 in Texas working on the case of Linda Carty, a British National on death row.

Reprieve USA

Reprieve USA is based in New Orleans and co-ordinates the US-based volunteer programme

Reprieve lawyers represent people facing the death penalty, particularly in the USA, or when those facing execution are British nationals. And we represent prisoners denied justice in the name of the ‘War on Terror’, including those held without charge or trial in Guantánamo Bay and the countless secret prisons beyond.

Reprieve states:

“Dale Leo Bishop’s execution ends another tale of inconsistency and injustice in the American criminal justice system.”

Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, said:

“It turns your stomach. With adequate representation from the outset, Dale would still be alive today. How anyone can stand up and defend the death penalty when justice is such a lottery is beyond comprehension.”

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Clive Adrian Stafford Smith OBE (born July 9, 1959) is a British-American lawyer who practices in the areas of civil rights and the death penalty in the United States of America.

Stafford Smith was born in Cambridge and educated at Radley College. He declined a place at the University of Cambridge to relocate to the United States when he won a Morehead Scholarship to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studied journalism before enrolling in the Columbia University Law School in New York. He is admitted to practice in the state of Louisiana and in Washington, D.C..

Stafford Smith was awarded the OBE in the New Years’ Honours list of 2000 “For humanitarian services in the legal field”. In August 2004 he returned to live in the United Kingdom. He is now the Legal Director of the UK branch of the human rights not-for-profit Reprieve.

Stafford Smith worked for the Southern Prisoners’ Defense Committee, based in New Orleans, now named 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, a 1987 BBC documentary showing the last fortnight in the life of Edward Earl Johnson before he went to the gas chamber in Mississippi State Penitentiary; Stafford Smith 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 of the murder for which Johnson was executed. In 1993, he helped set up a new justice center, for prisoner advocacy, in New Orleans.

Since returning to the UK, he has worked as the legal director of Reprieve, a British charity that is opposed to the death penalty. During his career he has lost six death penalty cases. From 2002 Stafford Smith has volunteered his services to security detainees at Guantanamo Bay and has assisted in filing lawsuits on behalf of 128 detainees. His clients include Shaker Aamer, Jamil al Banna, Sami Al Hajj, Sami Al Laithi, Abdul Salam Gaithan Mureef Al Shehry, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Jamal Kiyemba, Benyam Mohammed, Hisham Sliti. In a BBC interview, when asked why he was representing detainees, he answered that “liberty is eroded at the margins”.

It was during this period, in December 2004, that Stafford Smith prepared a 50-page brief for the defense of Saddam Hussein arguing that Saddam should be tried in the U.S. under U.S. criminal law.

Stafford Smith contributed to The Guardian on the US Supreme Court’s June 29, 2006 ruling on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld.

Stafford Smith speculated that Bush should have been secretly relieved that the more conservative members of the Supreme Court, who supported the administration’s appeal against the lower court’s ruling were in the minority.[2]

“In the end, I suspect there was a collective sigh of relief from the White House that the lunatic fringe did not prevail. The Bush administration has finally recognized that it must close Guantanamo but — for all that Bush bangs on about the importance of personal responsibility — it wanted someone else to take the blame.”

Contributions to the New Statesman

The New Statesman is a British left-wing political magazine published weekly in London. The current editor is Jason Cowley, whose appointment was announced on 16 May 2008. The magazine is committed to “development, human rights and the environment, global issues the mainstream press often ignores”.

In the issue dated 29 May 2006, then editor John Kampfner stated that the New Statesman remained “true to its heritage of radical politics”.

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