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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”.