Injustice, by English lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, has all the features of a bestselling thriller or Hollywood crime drama: an apparently innocent man framed for a double-murder involving money laundering and a drug cartel, and a court case presided over by a corrupt judge and defended by a inept lawyer.
However, far from fiction, the book provides an in-depth dissection of the US death penalty and its regulation, through the true case of Krishna Maharaj.
British businessman Mr Maharaj was sentenced to death in Miami for the murder of two business associates in 1987. His initial trial proved an open-and-shut case. Yet, despite damning evidence, Mr Maharaj continued to protest his innocence.
When Mr Stafford Smith – a young lawyer working for nothing – took on the case, the credibility of the initial trial was brought into question. The original judge was arrested mid-trial for accepting bribes in an earlier case. Witnesses placing Mr Maharaj 30 miles from the crime had been refused the opportunity to testify. Subsequent investigations also revealed that the victims were involved in money laundering, and implicated a Colombian drug cartel in their deaths.
In Injustice, Mr Stafford Smith describes his unsuccessful battle to secure Mr Maharaj’s freedom. Although in 2002 he was resentenced to life imprisonment, Mr Maharaj has been denied a retrial. From this starting point, and alongside personal anecdotes, the author goes on to explore the bureaucracy and corruption of the US legal system, where the death penalty is inextricably bound to the wealth of the defendant. The book provides a study of how innocence and guilt, and life and death, can be overshadowed by regulations, public opinion and financial concerns.
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