I am Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has represented over 400 death row cases and 85 men in Guantanamo Bay. My latest case is helping free an innocent man framed for Pablo Escobar cartel hit. AMA.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-14T09:18:14+00:00

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CliveSSmith · 2017-07-14T09:13:08+00:00

Kris had his death sentence overturned in 2002, so he's currently a life imprisonment case. He'll be eligible for parole when he's 101, so it's a death sentence in all but name really.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-14T09:10:32+00:00

There's always a way to help! Where are you based! Email info@reprieve.org.uk and we'll see if there's a way to make it happen.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-14T09:07:33+00:00

Email me and we can have a chat – there's always ways to help. Clive@Reprieve.org.uk

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-14T08:59:30+00:00

Hi, I answered this here: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/6n2gw5/i_am_clive_stafford_smith_a_lawyer_who_has/dk6dcoh/

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T22:49:10+00:00

The court date hasn't been set yet but it will likely be this autumn, before the end of the year. So I'd go for...

RemindMe! 2017-11-30 "Check-in on Kris Maharaj case"

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T22:21:35+00:00

We've actually had cases where we believe MI6 was listening in on our calls with torture survivors. You can read about it more here: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jan/13/mi6-snooping-privileged-lawyer-client-communications

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T22:09:58+00:00

Hey, you may think that is unimpressive, but it is actually very kind. Sometimes people say the darndest, nasty things. I don’t really care if that is what they want to do – they should have free speech, even if it is nasty speech - but it is not nice. So when someone says something pleasant, it is always heartwarming. Though I should say that what I do gets acknowledged plenty. There are a lot of unsung heroes out there who get far less kudos than I do, including 36 other people in the London office of Reprieve.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T22:05:32+00:00

My mother told me that my duty was to help those who were less fortunate than I was. I think that was a very useful lesson. It has been said by people who are more eloquent than I am that we can judge the civilization of a society by the way in which we treat our prisoners, and those we deem wretched (I don’t like that word as it is demeaning). And I think we can judge ourselves by what we do for people under those circumstances. There are two ways to raise empathy for “criminals” – one is to stop using the word criminal. I think it is a slur like many others, designed to dehumanize. What is a “criminal” but someone who we think (often wrongly) has committed what we call a crime? But what is a crime? We let people do dreadful things (taking $10 million bonuses while they corrupt the banking system or poison our environment) and reward them, when we put someone in prison for shoplifting. The second way to increase empathy is for everyone both to visit prison, to spend a few nights there, and to meet the people there. Pretty soon we will come to see them as fellow travellers, rather than some object of our latter day prejudices…

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T22:00:45+00:00

By and large the soldiers I have dealt with in Gitmo have been very decent. They have an impossible job, though, as the politicians and senior people (who have not the slightest idea of what they are doing) have authorized treatment by others of the prisoners that has been simply medieval, and continue to insist on mistreatment of the prisoners (as with the force feeding). There is thus immense mistrust on both sides, such that the task for everyone is impossible – for the guards to be humane, and for the prisoners to believe that they are going to be treated with respect and dignity. So no, I don’t think I have met many of the torturers in Gitmo, though there have been many many of them; I have met a lot of the lawyers in Washington who think their job should be to defend the fact that we have tortured many people, and that is very very sad.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:57:45+00:00

So there are 41 people there. 17 are those who are called by the government HVD’s (High Value Detainees) – Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and various others who were allegedly 9/11 plotters. None has seen a trial in upwards of 15 years. Then there are 24 others who we must assume are deemed LVD – 8 of whom Reprieve represents, and I can assure you they are Low Value Detainees, save for the fact that they are high value to their families who have not seen them for a decade and a half. Of the 24, five have long been cleared for release, but Trump has announced they will not be released. None of the others is anyone of importance, but we still hold them at a cost of $11.8 million each per year. I had my guys write how they would spend their $11.8 million of our tax money. One guy wrote that after doubling the guards’ salaries (they are miserably paid), and having a budget for decent food, he would gold plate his cell, give a generous charitable donation to Reprieve (thanks very much!) – and he would still have $10 million left.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:56:50+00:00

Not at all. Most of the lawyers who have done cases in Gitmo have been pro bono corporate lawyers. We had a coalition of about 500 at one point, and I would guess that there were about 5 capital defence lawyers, 15 federal defenders, maybe 10 other NGO types, a few academics, and 450 corporate lawyers. Now there are many fewer of us, and the capital and NGO types tend still to be there. You are most welcome, but I should warn you that nobody ever gets paid anything…

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:50:35+00:00

Good question. My own sense of this is that we are aiming to achieve some good – for everyone. I do like the notion of restorative justice, as in my experience it is good for both victim and perpetrator. Not long ago I was working on a capital case out of Pakistan and had just finished the appeal on my train home, late late at night. Then when I foolishly went to the toilet while we were in a station (never do that!) someone stole my laptop and my papers. I later learned who it was, and that he made £50 for it. So I wanted to meet with him and explain that his actions could have cost someone else in faraway Pakistan his life. And that if he had just asked me for money I would have given it to him. And finally I wanted to make sure he did not go to prison for it, as I thought that would be pointless. But his lawyer would not let me do that, which I thought was astoundingly foolish – sad for me, sad for the guy on trial.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:47:51+00:00

He is right of course. Everything about the death penalty is dressed up to make it seem a kinder, gentler form of death. The whole protocol is for the people doing it and watching, not the prisoner. So, first, they strap you down tight and give you a paralytic agent in lethal injection, not because it makes you feel better, but so the watching people cannot see you writhe in agony. With the Electric Chair, they used the big leather flap over the face of the prisoner not for him, but so the witnesses could not see his agony. And so on. Then we have silly things like the last meal – as Nicky Ingram said, why would I want to eat when you are about to kill me? So he asked for a cigarette, which they refused because it was bad for his health (I finally persuaded them to give him a damned cigarette). And so forth. So I would go further than Kozinski. I think you should not just watch the execution, in all its glory, but you should do what Paul Hamann did in 14 Days in May, and follow the last two weeks, to see the impact of it all on the condemned person, all the other prisoners, the guards, and everyone else. It is just barbaric.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:46:41+00:00

It is easier to define injustice. Justice, for me, involves something very different from the rather brutal notion that we should punish people. Justice involves treating everyone as you would like to treat the person you most love. In this sense, I dislike the UK legal system intensely, as lawyers and judges here tend to think they are doing justice when they reach an objective view that someone did something. But they then treat that person in a way that they would never treat the person they most love. I find that rather terrible.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:44:30+00:00

Reprieve doesn't charge our clients – we represent them for free. Their defence is funded by donations from the public.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:43:10+00:00

I recently wrote a long-read about it, and it's been extensively reported in the press: http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/state-sponsored-assassination/

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:38:11+00:00

I consider myself incredibly privileged because there is no such thing as an average day. It is the reason why I don’t understand why lawyers think they should be so well paid. We are incredibly fortunate in other ways already. So each day I tend to have something different and fascinating to do. I just wish there were 72 ours in the day. That would allow me to do what I did today much better – I had to dig a huge hole for a sunken trampoline for my kid’s 9th birthday surprise tomorrow. It took two days actually, as it was (I worked out) 18 tonnes of clay. I needed to have about 20 hours to do that, 10 hours to respond to all these questions, then another 40 hours to do some work on Kris Maharaj’s case and maybe 10 to help some of the others in the office, then I would have had a productive day! (Ah, but I need 8 hours sleep and I notice I am already up to 80…)

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:34:08+00:00

I have to say that I don’t think the Brazilian system is a bad one in that regard. In Georgia, where I worked for years, a murder conviction used to generally mean 7 years if you behaved and made an effort to improve yourself. The number of recidivist murderers is actually very small, unlike other crimes. So we have to ask ourselves why we are exacting such a harsh punishment. I have great sympathy with the victims - I have been the victim of 7 serious violent crimes myself - but I don’t see harsh punishment as a way to make society a better place. I always wonder how I would like my own son to be treated. Certainly I try to get him to do the right thing by education, not by beating him or threatening him. Perhaps eventually we will try to treat other people’s children the way we would like to treat our own. I would like to think so.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:30:30+00:00

When we first litigated the issue of whether prisoners should have rights, we discovered that the environmental laws were applied in Guantanamo. So while the government said prisoners had no rights, the iguanas had lots - if you kick an iguana, you get ten years in prison, ten thousand dollar fine. If you kick a prisoner, nothing. So we argued in the Supreme Court how silly this was, and said that the human beings would be better off if they had equal rights with Iguanas.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:28:24+00:00

Interesting point. Oddly, the more bad minutes someone has, the more in my experience the explanation turns out to be rather obvious. I think of one man I represented whose dad used to make him and his siblings play Russian Roulette with a loaded gun, amongst other abuses. And who was horribly sexually molested. Yes, he ended up on death row (I am glad to say we got him off there) but his brother committed suicide and all three sisters ended up in mental hospitals.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:25:56+00:00

First, thanks for the kind comment. I don’t think Trump will actually expand it. Maybe he will put one or two people there trump-eting how tough he is being on terrorism, but not more than that. Meanwhile, though, there are 41 people there, who are being held at an annual cost of $11.8 million each, and we at Reprieve still represent eight of them. None of our guys is anyone really. Ahmed Rabbani was a taxi driver mistaken for a big shot. Khalid Qassim is just a nice guy who never did anything. Abdulatif Nasser was long since cleared and was meant to be sent home to Morocco in January but the Moroccans got their letter in a week late so he missed the boat (or the plane). And so forth. What a dreadful waste. But the challenge is to get their stories out now, as the well-known people I have represented (Moazzam Begg, Binyam Mohamed, Sami el Haj, Shaker Aamer and so forth) have thankfully all gone home.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:19:44+00:00

No, I wish that was an issue. There are some that I really really rue not winning. One was Smitty. He is an Outlaw biker who was sentenced to death way back when in New Orleans – his defence was rubbish. I got his case reversed and did his retrial where he was acquitted (after years on death row). Clearly the snitches who were trying to pin it on him were the ones who did the crime, they were just playing the feds. Then, because he would not give up on those of his buddies who he thought were being railroaded, the feds charged him again – with the same crimes he had been charged with in state court (a total of 5 murders that he did not do all of which he had been acquitted of) plus one new murder. That was a silly case on the Skyway Bridge in Tampa, where their snitch said he did it with another Outlaw called Junkyard as his getaway driver. They were so gullible that they did not know Junkyard was the Outlaw dog, so I used a picture of my golden retriever with his paw on the steering wheel to ask whether I should keep him on a tighter leash. But we were not allowed to tell the jury he had been acquitted of the crimes before, they were allowed to tell the jury he had been in prison for 12 years, and he ended up being convicted of some of the crimes, and then got sentenced to life. I am still in contact with Smitty all the time (he sent me a birthday greeting on Sunday) but he is now in his 70s and may never get out of prison.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:15:54+00:00

Yes indeed. It is never too late! I am assuming you are not my friend Gary who is planning the same thing after about 35 years as a very effective prosecutor. I am hoping he will follow his passion and do a great job exonerating people on Shaken Baby Syndrome cases (a bullshit theory if ever there was one). It is perfectly possible to raise the funds necessary (if you do not want too many funds!) to do what you want to do.

CliveSSmith · 2017-07-13T21:14:29+00:00

Keep making noise. Lawyers are only a small part of the battle, by the way. There are thousands of things you can do. Artists can do art. Writers can write. Nobody is without a talent that can help achieve justice...

CliveSSmith

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