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>> after 26 years in jail, did florida police get the wrong man? this week, we investigate the shocking potential of miscarriage of justice and meet the man who is still serving time for a double murder he insists he did not commit. >> when i was found guilty, i fainted. i thought it was impossible to get convicted for murder when you did it -- when you did not do it. >> and one-year after london was torn apart by writing, could the police cope with another summer of unrest? >> i think they will only make things worse unless people are trained to deal with the situation. >> hello. a london businessman is entering his 26 year in jail in florida for a double murder he vigorously denies committing. is that by leading politicians of the u.k. believe he is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. as more evidence images suggesting he was framed, tim samuels' asks -- what more does this case need to win a retrial? >> i have suffered for 26 years. i went through hell. it has been killing me slowly for 25 + years. i did nothing wrong. what am i doing here in the name of god? >> how do you measure time after 26 years in it for in jail? do you count the days? the decades? your own shift from middle to old age? the minutes until lunch? the hours between pills? lost meals? >> how long does it feel to you that you have been in prison for? >> 26 years seems like 2000 years to me. every day is like a year for me. you have to take one day at a time. otherwise, you go insane. >> now, more evidence suggests that he spent 26 years in jail as an innocent man. >> chris was the fall guy. >> hi, chris. >> good to see you again. >> times were good in the 1980's, and having made a fortune, he and his wife divided their time between their home in london and miami. south florida itself was teetering. the ball out turf war between colombia's and cubans was being played out on the streets of miami. >> hickory dickory dock -- you just got busted by the cops. >> they were oblivious until this happened. >> a double homicide discovered in downtown miami. the middle-aged men died from multiple gunshot wounds. >> the father and son were found murdered in room 1215 at the dupont plaza hotel in downtown miami. that was on october 16, 1986. the next day, maharaj was arrested. >> what i -- when they said i was convicted, i fainted. i thought it was impossible to get arrested for something you did -- convicted of murder for something you did not do. >> i have been coming to florida on and off for 10 years reporting on the case. i cannot really get my head around why he is still in jail. what looked like a fairly open and shut case at first glance is anything but the more you dig into it. first, the prosecution's only eyewitness said he saw kris should the victims twice in front of him. yet, he has changed his story and failed a polygraph. there's also the fact that at the very time of the mortar, six people testified that he was 30 miles away in fort lauderdale. you saw him twice? between 11:00 and noon? >> i have no doubt at all. >> not one of the six alibi witnesses testified at the trials, at which the judge was arrested on date 3 and led away in handcuffs, charged with taking a bribe in another case. then there are the extraordinary questions about the man with the gun and silencer. an old colleague of this man told me that on the day of the murder, a gun and silencer were missing from his desk. >> what did it say to you? >> that he had sold a couple -- a bunch of his problems that night. that he had come into a great deal of money and some cocaine and what have you and that he had had to eliminate a few people to do it. >> when they tracked him down in trinidad, he was not too keen to talk. can you explain to me why? speaking to him is more than the police have ever done. the main prosecution witness, the -- out on the main prosecution witnesses, these six witnesses buckled and the court, enough to convince two former attorney general's that this does look like a miscarriage of justice. >> enough to have the death sentence commuted to 50 years for a 73-year-old, but not enough to win a retrial to present the new evidence. >> i do not spend time thinking why i'm in here. get up in the morning and think why am i in here. i did nothing wrong. >> the defense team has been looking closer at your case and turned up many leads suggesting that you are innocent. the testimony was to the damning. after the murders, he said he was with kris at the time, that he was innocent, and that he'd lived before trial -- flipped before trial. >> and said that he had planned it when i was with him. >> of course, you are listening to him in the background. good to have you with us. >> what made this star witness for it? more clues are emerging from his hometown, kingston, jamaica. we found out that the prosecutors flow over to help him lead the charge he was facing at the same time for carrying a few bullets into jamaica, a relatively minor charge, or so he thought. he is now dead, and his lawyer from the time now more forthcoming. >> he was charged with importation of firearms, and i think there were -- might have been other charges. >> it transpire he was facing charges of bringing guns, ammunition, and silence is into jamaica and this is potential life sentence. >> there was a fine on the charges, but no imprisonment. >> you must have been pretty surprised. >> i was delighted. i was delighted. i was delighted. >> do you think the prosecutors coming down on him to testify made the difference between him going to jail and not going to jail? >> let's put it this w -- i considered at that time that it might have made a difference, and that is why i called him. nothing of any value. it is purely ornamental. >> no confessions? your knowledge -- you do the most of his life. you went to his funeral. you were friends with him. why do you think he flipped from being an alibi to be in the prosecution's key witness? >> that is a question i cannot answer. i cannot penetrate the human mind. i cannot fathom the next year -- obscure motivations of human behavior. i do not know. suppose an argument could have been advanced that there was some form or inducements of pressure, but i do not know. >> i would tell the ex-cop who had been the defense's investigator at the time that geddes had escaped light but got a fine. >> that would explain to me why for months, he was a staunch supporter of krishna maharaj and the next time i saw him, he was testifying for the state in court. i could not believe what i was hearing. >> the news is not the only revolution which has come out. there is more about where the murders took place. did you know anything about him at the time? >> at the time, no. >> in the past year, miami detectives have arrested 4300 -- >> in mid-1980's miami was creaking under colombian cocaine, so when it transpired a colombian man had been renting a room opposite the letter and check that the day of the killings and there were traces of blood outside his door, you expect the police to investigate this fully, but they barely question him. a proper check up would have revealed what i can now show petrillo. >> he is believed to have carried more than $40 million to switzerland for deposits to swiss bank accounts on behalf of colombian drug smugglers. that an elected member of the colombian cartel in the room opposite the murders. >> is this dynamite information? >> of course it was. the whole case as far as i was concerned was drug-related. and kris maharaj was the fall guy. >> frustrating stuff for the british lawyer who took up the case 17 years ago. >> we have a big battle ahead of us. my plan is to develop the evidence a bit more and go to the florida state courts and try to persuade them. if that does not work, we have to go to the american supreme court. >> every piece of new evidence is bittersweet. who stayed by her man this whole time. >> i always dreamed about him when he was younger and always in london. the other day i dreamed that he came home and that he was embracing me and kissing me. >> short of a legal or diplomatic miracle, that remains a rather distant dream. >> i want to be out while i'm alive, not when i'm dead. i want to be vindicated. i do not want to be vindicated after i'm dead. and of police in britain called it the greatest psychological and physical challenge of their careers. riders said they -- rioters said it was their opportunity for revenge on the police theory nearly a year on from the riots storming england's cities, we piece together the events from those terrifying days and ask what went wrong. we have been given exclusive access to interview 130 police officers. many of those questioned fear that future budget cuts announced by the british home secretary will hinder their ability to cope with anything of the kind again. >> there was a war. for the first time, we were in control. >> they arrest people for no reason. >> that was the best three days of my life. >> six months ago, we interviewed hundreds of rioters. many of them describe the disorder like a war against the police. what was it like for the officers who were lined up against them? >> as i walked up towards the crowd, i vividly remember laughing eyes with someone in the crowd, and she started to chant, "murderer." the crowd started to follow along. >> the man had been shot dead by police in taught him two days earlier. chief inspector had to manage a peaceful protest. he was in charge that date. >> they wanted answers from the police in terms of what happened. they wanted an officer to convey those messages to them. i phoned the superintendent, and he made his way within the time span, which was an hour that i was allowed, but unfortunately, family had decided they had waited long enough, and they started to walk away from us. i must be honest, if they started to walk away, we could literally see them in the background, and that is when the wave of bottles, street furniture, and everything started to come in. it was explosive. >> the family had no part in the disorder that was breaking out. this meant it should have arrive soon appeared fatigued we zero hours, officers were outnumbered and under the cliff. they came under relentless attack. -- outnumbered and underequipped.-- >> we are talking about taking a freezer out of a shock and wheeled toward us. i have never seen -- i hope i never see anything like it again. >> as the night approach, police derived i taught them. >> as we got closer, we could make out the silhouettes of rioters. the noise started to increase dramatically. it was almost impossible to hear their radios. the most hostile, aggressive crowd dynamic that i have ever come across in my entire experience as a police officer. >> as the inspector led his officers on their first advance, he was knocked unconscious. this is him shortly after the attack. >> it was clearly something extremely heavy because it actually cracked my protective helmet. the xt thing i remember was being hauled up back on to my feet by two officers either side of me. i just shook my head, tried to regain my vision. i was conscious that we were so stretched on the ground -- i just felt i had to keep going, even though i knew i had been concussed. my biggest fear was having a police officer separated. if that happened, i have absolutely no doubt that there could have been loss of life. it was a possibility we might get shot at, for giggly if we were lord too far forward. i also saw what appeared to be machetes, so that was sending out a clear message to me that certainly if anybody got separated, it could all come to a very grisly end. >> one of the strongest findings in our research was that police on the front line feared they would be killed. senior officers, too, were astonished that no police died. despite these fears, i taught him, as elsewhere, police kept charging forward. -- in tottenham, as elsewhere, police kept charging forward. >> we were coming under the heaviest bombardment of the night. supermarket trolleys were being used by rioters to stock up with bricks from the nearby building site. we got leveled. i just remember feeling bottles exploding on lampposts next to me and getting showered in glass. we just did not have the resources at that point in time to arrest people. our priority was to protect colleagues from the other emergency services so that they could say life. >> over the next 72 hours, as writer looting spread across england, police faced a level of violence many said they had never seen before. >> my colleagues green, "i am being attacked." -- my colleague screamed. this machete had just appeared through the window and started hacking that his hand. >> gangs fired at police, even taking aim at the helicopter. in liverpool, rioters fought this is hand to hand battles with police. >> it was not looters who wanted to loot. it was simply a case of the wanted a scrap with the police. >> while officers in manchester focused on trying to stop boosters in the city center, elsewhere, they were overwhelmed and chased out, but it was in london where police were most under resourced. so desperate had they become the some of the forces least experienced offices -- officers found themselves on the front line. >> when it all kicked off, it was reversed it. >> michael lewis was on his first day in uniform as a special constable, a volunteer role. >> all i remember is seeing a brick come over the barricades before i even had a chance to think. it had split in two, broken open, where to me straight in the eye. >> he was seen by a medic and told to go to the hospital. he refused. >> i knew that we were outnumbered and that there were not enough police officers there. and thinking all i've got is a black of blood. i can still do this job. i do not need to go. >> he and a colleague were then coasted outside a store that had been looted. >> there were people coming up taking photographs because obviously, and there. there are, it's coming from the crowd -- there are comments coming from the crowd. and right in the middle, a picture, arms around him, smiling with a black eye in a photo that is probably going to go on facebook and myspace and be ridiculed for it, but at that time, that tactic was working for me. it softened the crowd could have potentially got quite aggressive again. >> by the tuesday, most of the officers from outside london had arrived. they helped bolster a huge show of force. 16,000 police were deployed on the capital's streets. >> when you had the 16,000 officers in place on tuesday, there was rioting in london. would it have been possible to have those officers deployed on that monday? >> it may have been a deterrent that there were 16,000 cops some people did not come out like they did, but the truth is that we did not see the large groups gathering like we had the previous night, so it was not that it was there and we were able to deal with it. it did not actually transgress in front of us. could we have gotten the 16,000 out before? if we have not had the monday have been before, they the we would have done, but there was nothing to suggest we needed that many officers on that particular night leading into it. >> the intelligence forecasting the scale of riots did exist, and much of it was on social media. police told us that sorting fact from fiction on facebook and twitter was one of their biggest challenges. >> was troubled in august because we did not have enough trained people. we did not have the right i.t. to be able to search social media. never before have we had to, although there's lots of things that we have done differently, have changed, and of doing differently as a result from what we have learned. that is the one that we really need to get a grip of. >> if police struggled during the riots because they did not have enough officers on the ground, how do they feel about the future? >> i think the courts are coming in, -- the cops that are coming in are only going to make things worse. we probably would not be able to do that again. >> they say it is not affecting front-line police officers. it is. we will be 16,000 police officers less in 12 months time. the next and we have disorder on the scale, they can do what they like. it will not get officers on that scale. >> we have spoken to hundreds of rioters and police in vault -- involve. many describe the experience as surreal. some said life had returned to normal as if the riots had never happened, but others cannot forget. >> i think about it. i only think about it every day. i have said this to my family. it is difficult to live with, really. one has to question one's self. i still everyday think about what we could have done as a service differently. that is life, i suppose, really. >> that is all for this week. from all of us, goodbye. >> make sense of international news at bbc.com/news. >> funding for this presentation is 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