Whatever motivates the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith to defend the
despised, it isn't the money. There are some large, honey-coloured houses in
the chocolate-box Dorset village of Symondsbury, but the Stafford Smiths'
dwelling is not one of them. Clive, his wife Emily and their seven-month-old
son, Wilf, inhabit a tiny terraced cottage - comfy enough, but its greatest
luxury is copies of The New York Review of Books by the loo. The
whole place would fit into the London living-room of some lawyers I know.
Nor is there room there for Clive to work. Emily makes me a cup of tea and
then, Wilf on hip, guides me outside, round the church, through the grounds
of the manor house to a medium-sized garden shed with steamed-up windows,
which is where her husband works when he is not in London or on the road.
“We call it the Pentagon,” explains Clive, after he has telescoped out of his
chair to meet me. And so it is, but very irregular and basic. There is a
wood-fired burner for heating, a rudimentary set of bookshelves, a dreadful
bit of human rights statuary that Emily won't have in the house, an Apple
Mac, an iBook and an iPhone, a Thermos for Clive's coffee, and no loo.
Although he says that he goes back to the house for a pee, I wonder. There
are bushes - and no one, surely, is that saintly.
He is so familiar; I seem to have been following his campaigns for much of my
adult life, certainly since he was the unexpected hero of the 1988 BBC
documentary about death row in America, Fourteen Days in May. Now
here he is, long, unblinking, always smiling, gorgeous-voiced with a hint of
drawl, wearing a grey jumper, jeans and blue Crocs. If you were in terrible
trouble, locked up in some appalling jail, no money, largely hidden from
view, he is who you would want to arrive and announce that he wanted to be
your counsel.
But while I could agree with him unconditionally about the death penalty and
not tolerating torture, that doesn't mean that I am unsceptical about
aspects of his arguments. Occasionally he seems to me to be on the verge of
denying that there ever was a terrorist problem, and I find some of the
stories of his clients unconvincing. However, Stafford Smith knew that when
he agreed to the interview, could have become precious about it, but wasn't.
With Binyam Mohamed, his client from Guantánamo, about to go public with
some documents that may suggest British collusion in his rendition to
Morocco, there were better propagandists for the cause out there in
medialand.
I ask him to tell me the story of Binyam Mohamed, as he sees it. In brief:
“They took someone who isn't an angel in white but isn't a terrorist of any
sort, and they ended up torturing him.” The case, he believes, conforms to
“an almost inexorable” pattern of suspicion and detention that he sees both
in the War on Terror and on the road to death row. “You start off with
someone people don't like: a black in Mississippi, or a Muslim.” Then “there
is almost invariably a snitch, an informant, doing something totally
understandable in human terms”, motivated perhaps by money or promises. In
the case of Binyam - in Pakistan in 2002, having fled Afghanistan - the
informant worked for a bounty.
Then the target compounds his problem by demanding legal rights, or keeping
silent, in places where the police understand such non-cooperation in only
one way - as a confirmation of guilt. The Chinese whispers travel all the
way back to a Washington that is obsessed with the possibility of an
al-Qaeda dirty bomb, and which now learns that Binyam had visited a spoof
atom-bomb-making website. Better safe than sorry, say the security people,
look how we were burned on 9/11. MI5 has tipped off the Americans that he
once lived in a Moroccan area of London (me neither), and so he is rendered
to the penis-slashers of North Africa before being taken to the limbo of
Guantánamo.
To me, this all seems plausible. But was Binyam as guiltless as he suggests?
Why was a recent Muslim convert from Britain in Afghanistan in 2001, when
most of the news from there was about the Taleban blowing up statues and
executing women in a football stadium?
“One motivation emphatically was the drugs.” Clive thinks that Binyam, a
recovering addict, saw Afghanistan under the Taleban as a puritan place.
“Another was a genuine desire to go and see a country that was touted among
the people he was with.” Clive expands on the point. Yvonne Bradley, his
American co-counsel for Binyam, “is a very sincere Christian and it's her
ambition to go to Jerusalem, even though it's very difficult”.
I think Clive is straining here. This idea of a pilgrimage to Afghanistan - in
lieu of Mecca or any of the Muslim holy shrines - strikes me as implausible,
unless you were a member of a very militant and fundamentalist strand of
Islam. “He did dabble with the whole idea of going to Chechnya,” agrees
Clive, “but not to kill anyone.” Who knows? It is hardly surprising that
this was a story, post 9/11, that seemed hard for the secret services to
swallow.
But this brings up Clive's great central concept - which is that, in a sense,
no one is guilty. Or, rather, that the question of their guilt is not what
is interesting; what is interesting is why they did what they did, if they
did it. Clive disliked Tony Blair's suggestion that the legal system needed
to be “rebalanced” in favour of the victim. He sees the system as being
inherently biased against the accused, and as pursuing vindictiveness at the
expense of comprehension. The prosecutors, he argues, should be consumed
with doubt about the guilt of those they prosecute. Those with the defending
mentality should prosecute instead - a fascinating suggestion which he then
undercuts. “I would never be a prosecutor,” he says emphatically. “ I just
don't want to be. That just reflects my bias.”
But why not? Because “the most interesting clients are the ones that patently
did do it”, he replies. Such as his reprieved client, the American child
murderer Ricky Langley, “the archetype of who people would say ‘fry the
bastard',” whose childhood was incredibly damaged by death and abuse.
Langley was one of the 300 people accused of capital offences whom Clive
represented during his two-decade stint in the US, a sojourn that began when
he turned down Cambridge at 18 and crossed the Atlantic to study in North
Carolina. There he found bad law and worse lawyers, and specialised in
defending those whom the rest of America - especially in the Southern states
- loathed. It is this work for which he was appointed OBE in 2000.
In the end, even Clive had enough of watching people on death row and of being
hated; Emily wanted to come back to Britain, a new lot of unpopular people -
alleged terrorists - had emerged for him to defend and, crucially, his
father had died.
Clive is now legal director of the UK branch of Reprieve, an international
prisoners' human rights charity, but is technically self-employed and
receives no salary from Reprieve. He is funded, instead, by the Joseph
Rowntree Charitable Trust as a “visionary”.
For one mad moment, Clive became tangentially involved in the defence of
Saddam Hussein. In Amman to try to discover the identities of those held at
Guantánamo, he was invited to meet Saddam's daughter, Raghed, and drew up a
document arguing that the fallen dictator should be tried internationally.
That was, fortunately, the end of his involvement. Saddam, he says, only
half-jokingly, “conforms to the principle that my clients must be hated but
violates the ‘no-money' principle! His family had money and I'm not
interested in people with money. ”
So they have to be poor and hated? If he were a young lawyer starting out in
Britain today, who would he seek to represent? “Paedophiles. Even Guardian
readers hate paedophiles.”
Stafford Smith always wants to know “why?” What about his “why”? Why the
hated? His answer to this is, to me, fascinating - and very unusual. His
father was, for a while, the millionaire owner of a stud farm near
Newmarket. A “very smart guy”, he was “always focused on being very
wealthy”. He would get involved with money-making schemes, many of which
were doomed to failure - so much so that many people thought he was a
fraudster, and when Clive was 13 his father went bankrupt.
The true story came out later. In 1963, when Clive was 4, manic depression was
diagnosed in his father. “He never accepted it. He took medication once and
would never do it again. So he used to do these crazy, crazy things.”
When Clive was 7 his father handed him £200 and told him to “piss off and live
by myself, or pay rent. His mantra was that society keeps people young for
too long. I should be a man and live by myself.” His mother later took the
money away and reassured her son, but it was “horribly confusing”.
“Most people thought my dad was bad, so it was a great relief to discover that
he was bipolar - that he was mad, not bad.” Rather like some of the men on
death row? Clive doesn't say.
By the time it was clear what his dad's problem was, Clive had gone to America
to escape him. But he didn't expect to escape the madness. “I don't
understand people who say that bipolarity isn't heritable. Of course it is.
And I didn't want to end up like my poor dad. I always assumed that I was
the next on the list. I even had a deal with my sister that if I ever went
off the rails, then she would commit me.” He adds: “My mother insists that
it's too late now. I'm too old to get it.” But he doesn't sound convinced.
He links what he just told me back to his motivation. “So if you choose,
instead of always striving, to do something really hopeless, you really
can't fail. Even if it ends in an execution, you can blame it on the system!
You can't ever be in the situation that my dad was.”
Those, then, are the demons that drive a saint. My guess is that the madness
stops here, and that Wilf will be OK about his rather wonderful dad. “He'll
probably become a Tory MP,” laughs Clive.
