Book review: Injustice: Life And Death In The Courtrooms Of America, Clive Stafford Smith

Harvill Secker, £14.99

HALFWAY through this engrossing book, Clive Stafford Smith asks a very simple question. What, in a trial, constitutes “reasonable doubt”? If you are 75 per cent certain that a man committed a murder, is that good enough? Will 90 per cent do? Is 95 per cent reasonable enough?

When he asked the question at a conference of judges in Louisiana, none of them put it any higher than that. In other words: executing one innocent man in 20 wouldn’t particularly trouble their consciences.

The miscarriage of justice Stafford Smith deals with in his latest book happened in Florida rather than Louisiana, but it helps to see it through the prism of those statistics. Because apart from in Hollywood films – and I love Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird as much as anyone – injustice isn’t always immediately obvious. Most times, it’s not black and white, but hiding in that 5 per cent of grey uncertainty.

Take wealthy Trinidad-born British businessman Krishna Maharaj. The case against him outlined by the prosecution in Miami in 1986 seemed unanswerable. Maharaj was arrested after his two biggest business rivals, Derrick Moo Young and his 23-year-old son Duane, were shot dead in a city hotel penthouse. There was a witness, who had identified Maharaj and placed him at the scene – and passed a lie detector test. There was ballistics evidence that the shots came from a type of gun the police said they knew Maharaj owned. There was a motive too: for years Maharaj had been involved in a feud with the Moo Youngs, a feud so virulent that he even bought a Caribbean newspaper in order to pursue it further.

If you were on the jury, at this stage – and certainly after the defence lawyer hadn’t offered anything much apart from a few character references – wouldn’t you vote Maharaj guilty? I would.