Clive Stafford Smith OBE

Songwriting For Songwriters

Clive Stafford Smith OBE - Episode 2 - Season 2

This weeks podcast is in 3 parts with different guests.

1 -Clive Stafford - Smith OBE British attorney who specializes in the

areas of civil rights and working against the death penalty in the

United States of America.

He worked to overturn death sentences for convicts, and helped found the not-for-profit Louisiana Capital Assistance Center in New Orleans. By 2002 this was the largest capital defence organisation in the South. He was a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, based in Houston, Texas. In addition, he has represented more than 80 of the detainees held as enemy combatants since 2002 at the US Guantanamo Bay detention camp. As of February 2021, a total of 40 men are still held there.

After returning to Britain, Stafford Smith worked as the founder of Reprieve, a British non-profit NGO that is opposed to the death penalty.

During his career in the US, by 2002 Stafford Smith had lost appeals in six death penalty cases, but had won nearly 300, earning reprieves from execution for those convicts and exonerating a number of them.

Clive has gathered over 180 cases of people that were executed on Death Row and Elijah and Clive have decided to work together on a project called 'Last Words' asking songwriters to respond to a case and the last words of a Death Row prisoner.

Interested songwriters can get involved by emailing [e-mail] to be sent a case and the last words of a prisoner.

2 - Chiman 101 is a hip-hop artist currently based in the south-west. Elijah and Chiman 101 have collaborated on a track called 'The Kingdom Come' responding to the case and last words of Death Row prisoner Jerome Bowden.

Chiman 101 discusses his writing, his influences and how he found his way into writing 'The Kingdom Come' with Elijah.

3- Alexis and Felicity. Alexis and Felicity are work experience students that happened to be on work experience as Clive and Elijah began the project and were asked by Clive to write a song based on the case of Jerome Bowden with Elijah. Alexis sang and wrote the melody and the words were written by Alexis, Coco and Felicity.