THE RULE OF LAW ORAL HISTORY PROJECT
Clive Stafford Smith
Director, Reprieve; Attorney for several GTMO detainees
An interview with Clive Stafford Smith conducted June 28, 29 and 30, 2010 by Ronald J. Grele for the Columbia Center for Oral History, Rule of Law Oral History Project.
Clive Stafford Smith is the Founder and Director of Reprieve, an organization that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners from death row to Guantánamo Bay. Mr. Stafford Smith has represented over three hundred prisoners facing the death penalty in the southern United States and has helped secure the release of sixty-five prisoners from Guantánamo Bay (and still works on behalf of fifteen more). Highlights of this interview include Mr. Stafford Smith’s discussion of his career spanning from more than twenty years working on death penalty, civil rights, and indigent defense issues at the Southern Center for Human Rights and the Louisiana Crises Assistance Center; being one of three lawyers who first sued and won access to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba in the U.S. Supreme Court case Rasul/Al Odah v. Bush (2004); and undertaking the discovery of the identities of unknown prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Bagram and Diego Garcia and other secret detention sites.
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