A full attendance on the second day clearly showed that the legal community of Lahore also supports these aims.
LONDON: In an article in this newspaper titled “Just deserts: Lawyers oppose death penalty reprieve”, April 14, Rana Tanveer stated that the Reprieve workshop on death penalty defence highlighted the support for the death penalty in Lahore’s legal community.
In fact, on the second day of the workshop when we asked whether any lawyers supported the death penalty for innocent people, the mentally ill or children, not a single person in the room raised their hands.
It has never been our intention to come to Pakistan and say that the death penalty should be abolished. We simply aimed to highlight how lawyers can better represent vulnerable clients who need their lawyers to do everything in their power to save their lives. A full attendance on the second day clearly showed that the legal community of Lahore also supports these aims.
Clive Stafford Smith, OBE
Director, Reprieve
Published in The Express Tribune, April 18th, 2011.
