The hearing will constitute his greatest chance in almost three decades to prove his innocence for the murders of his business partner Derrick Moo Young and Young’s son Duane in the Dupont Plaza hotel in Miami on 16 October 1986. Lawyers representing Krishna Maharaj, a British businessman who has spent the past 27 years in a Florida prison for a double murder that they say he did not commit, released on Friday details of the 53 witnesses and 498 documents they plan to call on in the hope of persuading a judge to order a retrial. One of them, Clive Stafford Smith of the legal support group Reprieve, who has written a book on the case, The Injustice System: A Murder in Miami and a Trial Gone Wrong, told the Guardian: “Kris Maharaj is so patently innocent that it is unimaginable to me that the state of Florida does not let him go. Florida 11th Judicial Circuit Judge William Thomas held a hearing in November to determine if new evidence from Maharaj's lawyers "undermines confidence in the verdict," according to court documents. Ordering a full evidentiary hearing on 24 April, he stated that Maharaj would be granted a new trial if he could persuade the court that the new evidence that will be presented at the full hearing was of “such nature that it would probably produce an acquittal on retrial”. Among the pile of documents to be presented are some allegedly demonstrating drug dealing and money laundering by the Youngs and records from the hotel. Maharaj, 75, was sentenced to death in 1987, and though he was taken off death row in 2002 he was resentenced to life imprisonment. In January Assistant State Attorneys Penny Brill and Sally Weintraub wrote that a defense motion for the new hearing was based on "hearsay and inadmissible evidence." Among the witnesses to be called at the evidentiary hearing will be six people who can testify that Maharaj was 30 miles away from the Dupont Plaza hotel when the murders happened.
– After 27 years in prison, Krishna "Kris" Maharaj may finally get a chance to prove what he's been claiming for years: that he was framed for a pair of murders actually ordered by infamous Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. CNN has a profile on Maharaj's case detailing how, in 1986, he was arrested for the Miami murders of his business partners Derrick and Duane Moo Young—even though he had an alibi. Police said the Moo Youngs had cheated the former millionaire out of $400,000. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. That sentence has since been reduced to life in prison, but in April a Florida judge scheduled a November hearing to determine if new evidence could undermine the verdict. Maharaj's lawyers have 53 witnesses and 498 documents on tap, according to the Guardian. "We've got several Colombian cartel people to say, 'We did the murders,'" one lawyer says. These cartel witnesses say that the Moo Youngs were money launderers for the cartel, and were killed because they lost some of the money. The lawyers also say they can prove that prosecutors hid evidence that would have proved Maharaj's innocence. But in court filings, prosecutors say the evidence is all "hearsay and inadmissible." (Click to read about how Escobar's hippos are causing problems in Colombia.)