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.”
