Nick Davies

Bob Easton was half asleep the first time he saw her. He was lying in the doorway of the Vaudeville Theatre on the Strand, well wrapped up in his sleeping bag and his blankets, and on an ordinary night he would probably have been fast asleep by now. But it was Friday, the worst night of the week on the streets, when you’re more likely than ever to get a kick in the ribs from some lager lover, so Bob Easton had one eye open for trouble, which is how he came to spot Sharon.

Karyn Smith and Patricia Cahill are, of course, our enemies. All drug dealers are our enemies. That’s the point of the war against drugs. So of course these two young women deserve all the abuse that has been heaped upon them – even if one of them does turn out to be innocent, even if the other one is guilty of nothing more than daftness, and even if they were both exploited first by the dealers who set them up and then by the avaricious officials who made money out of them on the other side of the world. That’s war. That’s collateral damage.

The story of Patricia Cahill and Karyn Smith is, in one sense, simply a story about injustice, in which two daft teenagers are robbed of their youth in a foreign jail, one for being reckless, the other for nothing – merely for being there. But beyond that, it is a story of intrigue and secret manoeuvure, in which almost every party behaves with breath-taking selfishness and in which the simple truth of the injustice is lost in a blizzard of lies.

Stephen Ronald Jakobi, aged 56, Cambridge graduate, former trial lawyer, leading light of the London Solicitors Litigation Association, and expert in personal injury claims, knows a thing or two about the law.

The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
December 12 1988
In Chouteau County, Montana, up by the Canadian border, life can be pretty hard. This is grain farming country. Farmers have to fight their way through every season, through the summer droughts and huge winter snowfalls, and then they have to hope and pray that grain prices [...]

The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
May 23 1988
This is the story of two kings. The first comes from humble origins, a street kid from New York, whose father died when he was a child, who learned to deal and steal for a living and who dreamed that one day he would be rich and [...]

The Scotsman and the New Zealand Dominion
February 22 1988
Anyone who knows anything about conspiracies, knows that for the best results the conspirators should meet in a smoke-filled room. This is particularly apt if you consider the case of the tobacco kings.
In a court case in Newark, New Jersey, three of the biggest tobacco companies in [...]