Later, Stafford Smith, began a group to end the automatic death penalty in USA. In 2002, Stafford Smith became a founding board member of the Gulf Region Advocacy Center, a non-profit law office based in Houston, Texas. It was designed to bring his legal methods developed at LCAC into the "capital of capital punishment", as Texas had the highest number of executions in the United States. Since returning to Britain, Stafford Smith has worked as the legal director of Reprieve, a British non-profit NGO that is opposed to the death penalty. During his career in the US, by 2002 Stafford Smith had lost appeals in four death penalty cases, but had won nearly 300, earning reprieves from execution for those convicts. From 2002 Stafford Smith volunteered his services to detainees held as enemy combatants at the United States detainment camp at Guantanamo Bay, established under President George W. Bush as part of the Global War on Terror. Stafford Smith has assisted in filing "habeas corpus" petitions and lawsuits on behalf of 128 detainees. His clients have included Shaker Aamer, Jamil al Banna, Sami Al Hajj, Sami Al Laithi, Abdul Salam Gaithan Mureef Al Shehry, Moazzam Begg, Omar Deghayes, Jamal Kiyemba, Binyam Mohammed and Hisham Sliti. In a BBC interview, when asked why he was representing detainees, Stafford Smith answered that "liberty is eroded at the margins". He returned to Britain in August 2004. That December he prepared a 50-page brief for the defense of Saddam Hussein, arguing that the former dictator should be tried in the U.S.A under U.S. criminal law. On 29 August 2005, Stafford Smith addressed attendees at the Greenbelt festival, a major UK Christian festival, telling them about the second hunger strike at Guantanamo. He warned the audience that prisoners were likely to die very soon. Due to restrictions imposed by the Pentagon (DOD), lawyers' notes must be filed with an intelligence clearing house in Virginia, before release. Conversations with clients are considered classified, and cannot be discussed until they have full clearance. Smith had to wait until 27 August 2005 to publicly reveal that the hunger strikes had started again on 5 August 2005. Two of his clients, Binyam "Benjamin" Mohammed and Hisham Sliti, participated in the hunger strikes. In an interview broadcast by BBC television evening news on 9 September 2005, Stafford Smith said that the second hunger strike was to protest against the imprisonment of juveniles under the age of 18 in Guantanamo Bay.