Clive Stafford Smith reports on the case of Linda Carty, and asks Scots lawyers to live up to the generous spirit that has come to define the country.

Ever since the notoriously tight purse of James VI, the English have imposed upon Scotland a reputation for thrift - dare it be said, for stinginess.

Upon closer inspection, many English beliefs prove unfounded: witness the notion that England are good at football, or that English goalkeepers are any better at stopping the ball than my two year old son Wilfred.

To be sure, when I brought three American university colleagues to Edinburgh in 1981, the owner of the B&B supervised the bath while I laughed and my friend drew two inches of hot water (costing twenty pence). She then took the taps away with her.

However, according to a recent survey, Scotland is now officially the most generous region of the United Kingdom. Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh rank among the five most charitable cities – with the bottom five all firmly located in England.

People in Scotland donate generously to charity, giving an average of £192 per year, £60 more than their neighbours just below the border. In 2007, the average Edinburgh adult gave eight percent more than the Londoner.

We must ask, then, what has eroded Scottish thrift? Have the Scots abandoned the prudence that led to the Morningside greeting (‘You’ll have had your tea, then’)?

In 1999, I founded Reprieve, the legal action charity that provides assistance to prisoners from death row to Guantánamo Bay. Challenging stereotype, I am calling upon Scottish lawyers to donate the monetary equivalent of a small slice of their time. Reprieve’s “One Hour” campaign encourages lawyers to donate the value of one billable hour to save lives in peril today.

An ancient adage tells us that capital punishment means that those without the capital get the punishment. All of our clients are poor; in 26 years of this work, I have never been paid anything by a prisoner, unless you count the hobbycraft potty that someone in the Louisiana State Penitentiary recently made for Wilf.

Reprieve is a small charity with a staff of 23, including lawyers and investigators who punch considerably above their weight. We prioritise the cases of prisoners accused of the most extreme offences, since human rights are most likely to be eroded at the margins. This is dramatically illustrated by the number of prisoners who are proven innocent. Far from being, per Donald Rumsfeld, the “worst of the worst” terrorists in the world, 74 percent of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay have been exonerated when we finally found a court that would listen to their cases.

When I first met Binyam Mohamed in a Guantánamo cell, the American military said he planned to detonate a nuclear device in Times Square; our investigation spanned four continents, and we proved that it was drivel, contrived when he was rendered to Morocco for a year and a half of torture, with razor blades slicing into his genitals.

There are plenty of examples of extraordinary generosity even among Londoners, notwithstanding their newfound tightwad reputation. Two years ago Clare Algar became our executive director, taking a 70% pay cut to join the charity from a major commercial firm. Our death penalty director is Julian Knowles. He is an experienced barrister who asked to work with us for two or three days a week, refusing a salary altogether.

Now the Conservative Party suggests that charities should take on the burden of providing services that government cannot afford, or is unable efficiently to provide. At Reprieve, we are expert at making the pound stretch: the Director General of the BBC spent as much on taxis last year as anyone at Reprieve is paid.

But it is naïve to believe that death rows can be emptied around the world without funding. It costs us £1000 to send a lawyer to visit prisoners for a week in Guantánamo Bay, or £200 to keep an investigator on the road for two days, uncovering the facts to save a life.

Sometimes, it is even more expensive. When we tried to stave off the execution of the profoundly ill British man, Akmal Shaikh, last Christmas, we flew a volunteer forensic psychologist to Urumqui on a promise by the Chinese government that he could perform a full evaluation. Thirteen thousand kilometres later the Chinese reneged, and set Akmal’s execution based on his incoherent assurance that he was not mentally ill. In the end, we had to fly two of Akmal’s family over to say farewell on the morning of his execution. It was the most compassion we could extract.

More often, the ending is a happier one, if equally expensive. We sent a lawyer, Anna Morris, to help Samantha Orobator in Laos. When Anna was granted her first “confidential” attorney-client meeting, she found ten Lao military officers in the room. They assured Anna that she could go ahead and speak openly as, although the trial had yet to begin, the decision had “already been made”. Despite this, thanks to Anna’s perseverance, Samantha is now home with her newborn child.

The execution chamber looms for others in the months ahead. Linda Carty is set to become the first British woman to die via state execution since Ruth Ellis. Her lawyer, Jerry Guerinot, has earned his reputation as the most ineffectual lawyer in Texas, with 20 clients sentenced to die on his watch. He spent just fifteen minutes with Linda before her trial, and never even worked out that she was British. Saving her life in the American capital of capital punishment is going to be a challenge. We will not achieve it – and she may not live to see in 2011– without help.

Lord Bingham may be deemed biased, as he is Chairman of Reprieve’s board. But he recently had this to say about the campaign: “Reprieve is doing an indispensable job for people facing inhumane prospects that no one should ever have to confront, and its successful record is self-evident. It’s the natural charity for lawyers because it does the work that we as a profession stand for.”

Clive Stafford Smith is the director of Reprieve, the UK legal action charity that uses the law to enforce the human rights of prisoners, from death row to Guantánamo Bay and the secret prisons beyond. For more information, see www.reprieve.org.uk, or contact Reprieve, PO Box 52742, London EC4P 4WS. Tel: 020 7353 4640.

To find out more about Reprieve’s One Hour club and how to join, please visit www.reprieve.org.uk/onehour or contact Laura at laura@reprieve.org.uk.