Reprieve
Why did you set it up?
Well, I set up Reprieve for a couple of reasons. One was that we had a number of British volunteers, young people mainly, from this country who were wanting to come out to the United States and work with us on death penalty work. At the time I was running another charity in New Orleans and during capital trials, and look we had so few resources that these young folk who would come out and work many, many long hours that would help us represent innocent people facing the death penalty. It was great. And the other reason was that I always thought that in Britain we needed more legal charities. You know for all the negative things that people say about America, there is a vibrant charitable process, where there are more legal charities, people helping folk in need in New Orleans alone than in the whole of Great Britain. So, I'm looking for us to import that to the U.K.
What countries around the world does Reprieve operate in?
We've got offices in Britain, in the United States and in Australia, and also in the Netherlands. We operate in a lot of countries around the world. Mainly at the moment we focus on the war on terror, or the war of terror, as Borat calls it, in terms of all the different secret prisons. That's worldwide, that's everywhere. Then in terms of the death penalty, we focus for the most part at the moment on British nationals facing the death penalty, not because British people have more human rights than others, but because that's just a very good way to focus our limited resources in such a way that we can get the British government to help, which brings a lot of power to the side of our clients. So, British people are currently on death row around the world in obviously the United States, but also Pakistan, Thailand, Malaysia, a few countries like that, scattered fairly wide.
Are there any countries that you won't go to?
Certainly not. There's no country where we wouldn't want to work. I mean, China for example, apparently has a couple of British nationalists facing the death penalty now. It's difficult to get there but it is really important with the Chinese violating human rights in its wholesale manner, so we certainly need to break that.
How are you funded?
Reprieve's funded by charitable donations, a lot of that, at the moment, by a few major donors more than anything else. We get grants, which is probably about 50% of our funding. And in the longer term, I hope we'll have lots of people who want to give us even small amounts, because capital punishment is where those without the capital get the punishment. We never, ever represent people who have money, obviously. I've never been paid by a client, ever in my career, and I hope never to be, because we're here to represent people who can't afford that sort of representation.
Do you have people working in the field all the time?
There are many people who work in the field full time with us. Some of whom are direct employees of the office who are out and about wherever they may be. Right now Zachary is in Guantanamo Bay; I just got back from there. We also had someone in America doing death penalty work for the last two months. We've also funded some people who we sort of help just to do this for one or two years in America full-time and we're trying to do more of that in other countries as well. Young people who want to get a job in this area, we try to help them for the first couple of years so they can get in there and keep on doing it. I want to exploit you and other people for the next forty years, this isn't just a part-time thing.
What is Reprieves biggest success story?
Gosh, it's hard to say what out biggest success story is. I couldn't possibly tell you of the three hundred plus people I've represented in capital cases which was the most important to me. In so many different ways, each is. I mean, if there's one rule that I would say encapsulates everything that we do, it's that each individual is a discrete important human being, not a statistic. So, to take a particular person would be very hard. I mean, I could go on for hours about the people who I've enjoyed and had fantastic results with representing. I could bore you to death for days with that.
Are there any cases that you won't take?
There are no cases I would refuse to take because of the individual and what they did, but there are some cases I wouldn't take because it's not necessary. So if someone's rich, like O. J. Simpson for example, I wouldn't refuse his case because of who he was. I'd refuse it because there are lots of high-powered lawyers who are going to charge him huge amounts of money to do the case, so what's the point? And I've turned one or two cases down like that, but it doesn't happen very often. There aren't many people facing the death penalty who have money.
How can the British public help?
The ways in which the British public can help are unlimited. Let's take two different levels: First, there's the death penalty. Now, everybody has a talent that they can use in one way or another. If you're young and you're keen and you don't want to spend the rest of your life wasting it working for some corporation, then you can come and talk to us about how we can create a career doing this. That takes work on the parts of the people who want to do it, but you've got lots of energy, you've got the rest of your life to do it for. So you should spend a lot of time dealing with that, and perhaps go on one of our internships to the U.S. to see what it's all about, and go from there. There are much smaller things that people are modest about, but they're very important. Making friends with the people on death row is desperately important. There are 5000 people in Britain who write to folk on death row, as a result in a large part of a documentary the BBC made many years ago called "14 Days in May," which inspired a lot of folk. Now that's great if you are a poor person on death row like Johnny Mack Westbrook, who I probably saw for the first time in Georgia in 1981. He had not seen someone from outside the prison for six years I think. I was the first person to go see him, and for him to get contact from the outside world, that was great. Now when it comes to Guantanamo and the secret prisons, again, there are unlimited things you can do. One of them, just to give you one of one of the many little ideas, we like to use the orange uniform as our motif, because that's what the prisoners in Gitmo wear, and on death row. And I want to have a competition for the silliest photograph using that uniform. I want you to get that uniform onto Nelson, up on Nelson's column. Take a picture of something like that, you can dub it up. Even with little things like gardening. We created a campaign for the prisoners in Gitmo. The Geneva Conventions say you have the right to a garden if you're a prisoner, so we got the British people sending seeds and gardening advice to the prisoners in Guantanamo. We then dropped all of that on Donald Rumsfeld, saying if they really do have the Geneva Convention rights, let them have a garden. We won! Fantastic victory! Not exactly going to secure the release of the prisoners, but if we can just get it onto "Gardener's World," then that means there's more people that care about human rights than the state of our plants. So there's no limit. There is also no excuse for not taking part.
Can people give money?
People can certainly give money, it's something that's desperately important to us. In terms of representing people, it's not for free, we have to fly around just to get the right to represent the prisoners in Guantanamo. The American government told me we couldn't do it without the prisoners' or their families' permission. We couldn't see the prisoners, because they are held incommunicado in Cuba, so I had to fly all around the Middle East, holding sort of meetings with family members, to explain to them that not everyone in America wanted to do harm to their loved ones and to get their permission to represent their sons and brothers in Guantanamo. And representing these guys, when we go to Gitmo, we have to have translators for a lot of clans. I try to talk to prisoners in a language I vaguely speak including English, and then really quite badly, French and Italian. And they laugh at my jokes, but I think they're laughing at me, normally, but to get an Arabic translator costs us well over a thousand dollars a day and you go there for two weeks, twenty thousand dollars. And we're a small charity, we don't have that sort of money, so we're desperately in need, always, of donors.
