A Shackleton Award winning campaigner who “fights miscarriages of justice and demands reform,” practicing solicitor Emily Bolton is married to Reprieve founder and one of “Britain’s most powerful civil rights lawyers,” Clive Stafford Smith. This Dorset born stonemason’s daughter, herself, founded the Centre for Criminal Appeals in the UK in 2011 after previously representing wrongfully convicted prisoners in the United States through the George Soros funded Innocence Project in New Orleans. She is a graduate of the University of Melbourne and Tulane University and her work trying to highlight the flaws in the 2011 convictions of the ‘Freshwater Five’ fisherman is clearly illustrative of her tenacity and dedication. Bolton’s sterling efforts in this regard were quite correctly highlighted in an April 2020 in-depth analysis of this most likely bungled case in the Guardian and in 2017, she tellingly commented: “Human beings make mistakes, and no system has more human parts than the criminal justice system. If it can’t identify and rectify its mistakes, it is doomed to repeat them.”
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4 comments
The Freshwater Five case stinks. Hampshire Police messed it up and they needed someone to pin their error on and those somewhat naive fishermen were ideal. And 104 years slam dunk later, case closed. Well done to this lady for bringing it up again and the Guardian article is brilliantly analytical.
As someone very much against injustice I must say I like the style of this lady. She has studied hard from what I read from the article link I clicked and she has taken on causes fame seekers may not have bothered with. The Guardian article on the fisherman was fascinating especially.
Well done Emily. Keep up your great work.
Really great to have people like you , question haw about Spain any foundation or you able to work take cases here in Andalusien
Thank you