Clive Stafford Smith

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 21 November 2004

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sue Lawley's castaway this week is the death row lawyer Clive Stafford Smith.

Clive Stafford Smith spent more than 25 years representing people on death row. He's saved hundreds of lives and counts his clients among his friends. He says his work is his calling - one he was drawn to after writing an essay on capital punishment while at school. Initially he thought it was a history essay and was appalled to find the death sentence was still in use. He planned to become a campaigning journalist, but a summer spent meeting prisoners on death row inmates convinced him that he would be able to achieve more by representing them directly. So he trained in law and set up his own legal practice to enable him to do so. He has received several awards for his work including, in 2002, the OBE.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello I'm Kirsty Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.0	The program was originally broadcast in 2004 and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My castaway this week is a lawyer, the head boy of an English public school, he rejected
0:34.4	the opportunity of a university education at home and took himself off to America.
0:39.3	He might have been a journalist, but an early encounter with prisoners on death row changed the course of his life.
0:45.5	He decided to work in their defence and having graduated from Columbia Law School, he spent the
0:50.4	last 26 years doing just that. He's represented 300 inmates of death row, many of whom have become his friends.
0:58.8	Always emotionally involved with their plight and a passionate opponent of capital punishment, he's been awarded
1:04.6	the OBE and the Lawyers Lifetime Achievement Award for his work.
1:09.3	No one, he believes, should be judged by their worst actions alone.
1:13.8	I can see no higher calling, he says.
1:16.1	I just like to do this work with these people.
1:19.3	He is Clive Stafford Smith.
1:21.6	So it's more than a job for you then, Clive, is it? It's a calling and hence
1:25.8	you're not loyally in that you're dispassionate, you are emotionally engaged always with them.
1:30.5	Oh, I always feel bad for people who have thank God it's Friday on their desk,
1:35.1	so I'm afraid I have thank God it's Monday on my desk, not that that really makes a difference because
1:39.2	the weekends merge, but it's such a privilege, so much fun in a bizarre way to represent people for their lives.
1:46.2	So you live through the whole experience with them and with their families?
1:50.8	Well that's true, although I do think sometimes we overrate our own experience.
1:54.7	I mean certainly as you're sitting there and someone's getting executed, the lawyers
1:59.0	suffering is not on the same scale as the poor person who's being executed.
	...

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