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Articles by Clive Stafford Smith
Finding a Life's Vocation
I have spent over twenty years fighting against the death
penalty in the U.S.A. A Supreme Court Justice once referred
to our rather desperate gaggle of capital defence lawyers
as ‘Death Row Guerrillas’ and, being no fan of
Che Guevera, he did not mean it as a compliment. One might
think that a human being facing execution would receive the
best legal defence the system has to offer, but the richest
country on earth does not recognize the right to counsel for
prisoners on death row. Our clients often face an execution
date only days away, and we have virtually no resources with
which to defend them.
Without the work done by volunteer interns who come over from
the U.K. to help, through the Reprieve Internship Programme,
many more of my clients would be dead. Reprieve interns have
devoted the equivalent of more than 10 years of full time
work to capital defence offices in the U.S., all at no cost.
Since beggars can’t be choosers, these volunteers are
given immense responsibility, but I have yet to be disappointed.
To give an example, it was the work of these interns that
helped to establish the right to counsel in post conviction
proceedings in Mississippi. Willie Russell, an African-American
death row prisoner convicted of the stabbing of a prison guard,
came within 45 minutes of execution in Mississippi without
the state giving him a pen and paper to write an appeal, let
alone a lawyer. We got an eleventh hour stay, and then sued
on behalf of Willie and the other 80 death row prisoners in
that state for meaningful access to courts for those on death
row. Such civil litigation is labour intensive, and like all
capital defence offices, we were light on labour. But then
a host of volunteer interns came to the rescue and spent months
working with the entire death row population to build the
case for the right to counsel. The interns administered an
IQ test to each prisoner, proving that 32 percent of them
were mentally disabled. They gave the prisoners the Law School
Admissions Test (LSAT) on the principle that if a prisoner
could not get into law school, he should not have to represent
himself in the most complex litigation known to the law –
and nobody passed. As a result of this work, the Mississippi
Supreme Court, seeing the writing on the wall, became the
first (and only) American state court to recognize the constitutional
right to counsel for those challenging their death sentences
in post conviction proceedings.
The work of individual interns makes a difference as well.
Last year, Andrew Byles spent several months working alone
in a small Louisiana town where my client, Sigmund Van Dyke,
had waited almost eight years without being brought to trial
due to the lack of resources available to the public defender.
Andrew visited all 1,200 prisoners being held on remand in
the local jail, to assess the quality (or absence) of their
legal representation by the public defender. He became a local
hero when his work resulted in the release of more than 50
who had been held without trial (and often without seeing
a lawyer) longer than the maximum sentence that could possibly
be imposed, had they had been convicted. Other volunteer interns
studied the racism of prosecutors in Jefferson Parish, and
the league table of bigotry that resulted from their labour
is immortalized as www.blackstrikes.com
(the legal term for the prosecutors’ challenges is actually
‘backstrikes,’ but the addition of an ‘l’
was more descriptive of their practices).
Currently Reprieve has 6 volunteer interns in the USA, with
a new contingent arriving for the summer. Clemmie Harrison
has spent the last 3 months working on conditions at a prison
in Louisiana, which is rapidly becoming known as ‘Abu
Ghraib on the Mississippi’ for its brutality. Gideon
Habel is working as an exoneree advocate, assisting those
who were wrongfully convicted with rebuilding their lives.
Wambui Mwangi is investigating the case of a French national
on Death Row in Louisiana.
If you are given the immense power that comes with a legal
training, then it is important to look around to see who most
needs assistance. Normally, it will be the person who is most
despised, and our moral obligation is to get in between those
who are doing the despising and the object of their ire. It
is difficult to find a group of people who are more vilified
than those whom we would systematically strap down on the
gurney and execute.
The Reprieve volunteer interns who dedicate three months in
the U.S. are known as ‘exploitees’ in the trade,
as they do an enormous amount of work, and are paid nothing.
But it is an honourable title. They are the unsung heroes
of many a stay of execution. The British are not just the
single largest foreign investors in the U.S. economy –
we also have more citizens there defending those facing the
death penalty than any foreign nation.
For many interns, the three month tour of duty leads to a
lifetime commitment, supported by Reprieve’s Fellowship
Programme, which awards funding to young lawyers and investigators
to launch projects and careers in capital defence. In fact
over the next month I am forced to play the unenviable Alan
Sugar role of trying to select two out of seven candidates
to become the next death penalty defence apprentices, a task
almost as painful as those scenes in the Boardroom, though
for different reasons. Reprieve is currently looking for law
firms and other corporations to sponsor Reprieve Fellows in
this work at £20,000 a fellow; perhaps Sir Alan might
like to get in touch? |
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Reprieve
PO Box 52742
London EC4P 4WS
Tel: 020 7353 4640
Fax: 020 7353 4641
Email: info@reprieve.org.uk
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