• Clive Stafford Smith
• 2004-05-01
• Robert Burns Humanitarian Award

Clive Stafford Smith, a British lawyer who practises in the areas of civil rights and the death penalty in the United States of America, has spent 25 years working on behalf of defendants facing the death penalty in the USA.

After graduating from Columbia Law School in New York, Clive spent nine years as a lawyer with the Southern Center for Human Rights working on death penalty cases and other civil rights issues. In 1993, Clive moved to New Orleans and launched the Louisiana Crisis Assistance Center, a non-profit law office specialising representation of poor people in death penalty cases.                                     

In 1999 Clive founded Reprieve - a number of not-for-profit organizations around the world which work against the death penalty, with a particular focus on legal support for those facing the death penalty. In 2000 he was awarded an OBE for ‘humanitarian services’.