Interview: Clive Stafford Smith author of Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America

The story he tells in Injustice: Life and Death in the Courtrooms of America is as compelling as any detective thriller.

Kris Maharaj, a British citizen born in Trinidad in 1939, is accused of shooting dead two men of his acquaintance in a hotel room in Florida in 1986. There seems to be evidence and eyewitness testimony. He is tried and sentenced to death.

Seven years later an English lawyer with a US practice is asked to look at the case and discovers wilful errors made by the police, the prosecution, the defence, the forensic experts, and a succession of judges. The principal prosecution witness, Neville Butler, at first looks simply shifty but as papers withheld by the prosecution from the defence gradually reveal over the years, he has been comprehensively suborned by them. The papers include a report that he had failed a lie detector test despite the prosecutor telling the trial that he had passed, in order to persuade the judge to rule inadmissible Maharaj’s own lie detector test that he had passed, on the basis one simply cancelled out the other.

Of course, the narrative is helped along by that English lawyer with the gimlet  eye for evidential discrepancy and determination that truth will out – Clive Stafford Smith himself.

The reader can only imagine how irritating it must be for the other players in the drama to have their blunders and sleights of hand brought to wider attention by a rather posh-sounding English public school old boy, young then and still unfeasibly youthful-looking at 53. He does, of course, say it wasn’t all him and pays full tribute to the team of colleagues and volunteers along the way.

Twenty six years later Maharaj is still in jail. He was on death row for 16 years before having his sentence “reduced” in 2002 to life imprisonment after a court hearing at which the judge threatened to imprison his lawyer, Stafford Smith, if he or any of his witnesses, including Conservative MP Peter Bottomley, uttered the word “innocent” before the jury.

More recently, as legal director of Reprieve, the London-based organisation that “… delivers justice and saves lives, from death row to Guantanamo Bay, ” he has represented scores of detainees held in legal limbo in the USA’s prison camp in Cuba, and is also focusing his attentions on the (“complete absence of a”) legal basis for the US use of drones in extraterritorial assassinations.

At home in rural Dorset he is as energetic about what he perceives as the high-handed activities of West Dorset District Council and delighted a local community choir by rewriting the words of some rock classics for them to stiffen dissenting sinew.

Round Bridport way it is commonly assumed that Pink Floyd’s original words included: “Hey. Council. Leave Bridport alone. All in all it’s just another trick on us all.”

Stafford Smith is also a prodigious tweeter, enthusing to his 6,938 followers about the recent Proclaimers concert in Bridport. “They’ve done a few benefits for Reprieve over the years. They dedicated their last song to my wife for our wedding anniversary – for Emily, The Joyful Kilmarnock Blues.”

In Injustice it is shocking how many of the participants – from the prosecution to the police, defence and expert witnesses – whose personal interest, career development or professional ineptitude led, he is convinced to Kris Maharaj being convicted of a crime he did not commit.

Stafford Smith does not let them off the hook as individuals but directs his main ire at the system in so many US states that places the pursuit of convictions above ensuring fair trials. Despite long-running TV series such as CIS, forensic sciences are rudimentary in many states and rarely available to defence lawyers. There is no funding for defence in many states even, or perhaps particularly, those that retain the death penalty.

This is not a revelation to anyone acquainted with the Innocence Project in the United States that has sprung more than 200 death-row inmates on the basis not of some technicality but that DNA evidence eventually revealed they were not guilty.

Novelist John Grisham covered similar ground in The Innocent Man: Murder and Injustice in a Small Town, his 2006 non-fiction account of the miscarriage of justice that befell Ron Williamson and his lost years on death row.

In most of the USA state prosecutors are elected. Experience shows that most successful candidates run on a platform of more convictions and harsher punishments. Stafford Smith cites research that indicates successful applicants for employment as prosecutors tend to be drawn from “a very specific pool of societal and political attitudes” which makes it hard for them to keep in mind the presumption of innocence.

Although the prosecution services in the United Kingdom do not have the same direct link to populism, Clive Stafford Smith is bothered that they may be voluntarily going down the same politicised route.

“It’s more than just a danger, it is here,” he says. “I get extremely concerned that prosecutors here are increasingly referring to convictions as “successes” and setting up league tables that they can publish to show how well they have done by adding a couple of percentage points to the number of convictions they have secured. It isn’t healthy for them or us.”

Stafford Smith studied journalism in the United States before taking up law. He certainly writes well but what does he consider himself to be now – primarily a lawyer or a campaigner?

“I don’t see the difference really. In a case like Kris Maharaj where the authorities are keeping a man who is in his 70s and is very unwell in jail for a crime he didn’t commit and where the legal procedures seem to be exhausted, there is only the court of public opinion left. If the judicial authorities won’t hear the evidence in court they’ll have to hear it from somewhere else.

“It’s the same with the drones. The more people know the facts the more horrified they are. And, of course, Britain has been assisting in passing on intelligence about ‘targets’ which in my view makes us complicit in war crimes. More on that to come.”

The epilogue to Injustice appeals for anyone out there who may wish to fund Maharaj’s continuing legal costs, or who might have useful information that may relate to his case, to get in touch via Reprieve. At this late stage what are the chances of either?

“We have had a substantial donation from John Grisham. That’s very sweet. But interestingly we have had some new information about Tino Geddes, the man who first gave Kris an alibi and then withdrew it. We never knew why. He died last year and it is only now that people are beginning to talk and we now discover at the time he wasn’t the upright citizen he was presented as in Kris’s trial, but was facing a life sentence on charges of smuggling guns into Jamaica. We need more but I am rewriting the last chapter for the US edition of the book.”

• Clive Stafford Smith appears tomorrow at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 3-4pm.