Krishna Maharaj: British businessman loses bid for freedom from US jail

Court decides there is insufficient evidence to overturn double murder conviction

(Reuters)

Krishna Maharaj, the British businessman who has been behind bars in Florida for nearly three decades for a double murder in a Miami hotel room his lawyers insist he did not commit, has lost what may be his last chance to win a new trial and almost any hope that he will ever regain his freedom.

After presiding over a four-day evidentiary hearing in November that included testimony from defence witnesses claiming that the victims, father and son Derrick and Duane Moo Young, were instead killed by henchman of former Colombian drug king Pablo Escabar, US District Judge William Thomas yesterday said there was insufficient evidence to overturn the conviction or order a new trial.

The former 75-year-old former banana importer who was born in Trinidad who once owned a fleet of Rolls Royces and a stable of race horses was arrested for the 1986 killings in Room 1215 of the long vanished DuPont Plaza Hotel in downtown Miami and convicted at trial. He was given a death sentence that was commuted to life imprisonment in 2001 after improprieties by the trial judge were uncovered.

Direly problematic from the outset, the case of Krishna Maharaj, one of only a few Britons ever to be placed on death row in the United States, had attracted worldwide attention amidst growing concern he had been the victim of an epic miscarriage of justice. In 2001, as many as 293 prominent British figures, including former London Mayor Ken Livingstone and former Attorney General Nicholas Lyell , signed a petition to the then Florida governor, Jeb Buish, demanding a retrial.

His case was taken up by the London-based prisoners’ rights group Reprieve in 2006. Its founding lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, led the defence bench pro-bono at the November hearing.

Attention to the plight of Mr Maharaj, whose brother was once the Attorney General of Trinidad, came as a profusion of missteps and judicial embarrassments came to light. His original death sentence was overturned when it emerged his sentencing judge had instructed prosecutors to draw up a death sentence request even before arguments at trial were concluded. That judge replaced another who had been led away in handcuffs after attempting to bribe the defendant in return for finding him not guilty.

After the hearing in November heard a litany of fresh evidence pointing to the alternative scenario for the slayings of the two victims – notably that they had been targeting by henchman of Mr Escobar for whom they had allegedly been laundering drug money, some of which they had mislaid – had given supporters some hope that at least new trial might have been ordered yesterday.