Excerpt:
A British black-cab driver who was sentenced to 38 years for a murder during the Iraq war should never have been prosecuted, according to the lawyer who helped overturn some of Britain's most notorious miscarriages of justice.
The trial of Anis Sardar at Woolwich crown court in May is an example of how British justice is prejudiced against Muslim defendants – in the same way it was in the 1970s against Irish Catholics, dozens of whom ended up wrongfully convicted, said human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, who represented the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.
A jury found Sardar, 38, guilty of the murder of US serviceman Sgt Randy Johnson, who died in Baghdad in 2007 after his vehicle went off-road and hit an improvised explosive device (IED). There was no evidence to connect Sardar to the bomb that killed Johnson, a father of two who lived in Germany, but his fingerprints were on a different type of device that was found in the same suburb of Iraq's capital city.