There is a dark heart to American society, far removed from the sunny uplands of ‘have a nice day’. The ‘land of the free’ is also the land of the incarcerated, of the electric chair and the lethal injection, of three strikes and you’re out (life without parole for sometimes minor felonies), and of Guantánamo Bay. 

As a teenager, British public schoolboy Clive Stafford Smith became obsessed with the innermost chamber of this dark heart – American capital punishment, especially in Southern states where the administration of justice can seem a close relation to lynch-mob law. Poor defendants are railroaded into years on death row –