Name Alan Clarke | ||
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Education College of William & Mary, Queen's University | ||
Alan W. Clarke, J.D., LL.M., is best known for his work opposing the death penalty. He is currently an Associate Professor of Integrated Studies at Utah Valley University.
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Education
Clarke did his undergraduate work at William and Mary, where he also finished his law degree. His thesis at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario for the LL.M. 1994, is titled "Procedural Labyrinths and the Injustice of Death: A Critique of Death Penalty Habeas Corpus." A recent book (with Laurie Anne Whitt, Fall 2007), "The Strange Fruit of American Justice: International and Domestic Resistance to the Death Penalty," argues that executions in the U.S. have far-reaching effects on relationships between the U.S. and other countries worldwide.
Legal work
Clarke's trial experience has been in Indian law, capital murder, and habeas corpus (including death row representation). He has been an ACLU cooperating attorney, including voting rights litigation for the Virginia ACLU. In 2008 he received an award from the NAACP for his voting-rights work in Lancaster County, Virginia.
Clarke helped organize the first successful fishermen's union south of Mason–Dixon line in 1988 - Reedville Fishermen's Association. He was counsel for "Fight For Justice," a group of dissident Anishinaabe at Keweenaw Bay Indian Community in a struggle to regain voting rights arbitrarily stripped by the Tribal Council. He assisted lawyers in Mexico in representation of a transportation workers union, SUTAUR, which was illegally declared bankrupt and its leaders and lawyers jailed after the union expressed its support for the EZLN uprising in Chiapas.
Academic work
In recent years, Clarke has organized two international symposia on the death penalty, bringing together activists like Sister Helen Prejean, author of Dead Man Walking, with scholars like Robert Johnson, Professor of Justice, Law, and Society at American University, Michael Radelet, Professor of Sociology and Chair, Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Mark Warren, Director of Human Rights Research and Daniel Medwed, Professor of Law at the University of Utah.
One of Clarke's lectures on abolishing capital punishment is available in podcast form.