'Framed for murder by Pablo Escobar' - British businessman's 'millennium' in a Miami prison

British businessman Kris Maharaj once had a huge fleet of Rolls Royces and a racehorse collection second only to the Queen.

In 1987 he was convicted of a double murder which his lawyers say was carried out by Pablo Escobar's Colombian drugs cartel.

Here he writes for ITV News ahead of an upcoming hearing - triggered by new evidence - which could either lead to his release or end all hopes of freedom.

People often ask me whether it seems like 28 years, my lost life in this terrible prison.

“No!” I say, “more like 280 years. For every week seems like a year.”

But then I pause, because I realise that my mind must be going.

I am 75 and once, years ago when I was calculating the cost of importing my fruit, I would have got the arithmetic correct. The proper product of 28 x 52 is well over a thousand: 1,456.

Maybe I have been here for a millennium. It certainly seems like it.

I am ashamed to say that I used not to spare a thought for those in prison.

To be sure, when I was wealthy, I gave some money to Nelson Mandela’s support fund, but that was more because a friend asked me to than because I had any empathy for what was happening to him.

I was rich. I had everything life could offer. I did not appreciate just how fortunate I was.

I certainly did not comprehend how loyal and steadfast my wife Marita could be.

As I spent 15 years on death row followed by almost as long again on a life sentence, I saw many relationships break down.

Some were sundered to the electric chair; other men aged and died at an alarming rate, shuffled into the hereafter by dreadful prison healthcare; most marriages were dissolved by lost hope on both sides of the prison bars.

But Marita has never wavered. She would always remind me how she promised to stand by me for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.

I do not remember the oath saying anything about “in liberty and in prison”, but dear Marita has added that clause to our marriage vows.

If it were not for her, I do not think I would care to live this half-life any longer.

I never think about my former fortune – the Rolls Royce, the horses, the high life. It would be too painful.

I exist, suspended in limbo, wondering whether I will regain consciousness some day.

Indeed, when the jury convicted me, I fainted. I simply could not comprehend what had happened.

I do not blame the jurors. They were duped by what was - and more importantly was not - said at my trial.

I pray for the people who actually killed Derrick and Duane Moo Young, as well as for the victims themselves and their family.

I have recently learned that the true assassin was ultimately fed into a wood chipping machine some 20 years ago, when the Colombians were trying to capture his boss, Pablo Escobar.

My situation seems even more surreal when I learn I am playing a part in a real life version of the movie Fargo, but even if the man was a savage he did not deserve what happened to him.

When I was recently told that a jailhouse snitch has come forward to say I "confessed" to him years ago that I actually did these murders, and that my banana company was really a front for the Medellin Cartel, I am afraid I just laughed.

What more could they try to do to me? In the 1970s I drove myself close to bankruptcy when I sued Lord Cockburn, taking on the banana cartels who were squeezing the small importer out of the business.

Now this man says I was wasting my time, as all my bananas were stuffed with cocaine, destined for the streets of Brixton.

I don’t take him seriously, and nobody else should either.

And yet I understand his urge to get out of prison. I think perhaps the authorities are naïve – as I was once so naïve – in underestimating the lure of freedom that they dangle in front of the long-term prisoner.

For this man to debase himself to try to purchase his liberty must seem a small price to pay after his years of incarceration.

What does it take for an amoral person to lie against someone he does not even know? Not much.

They say that “the wheel of justice grinds slowly, but it grinds fine”: I fear that it merely grinds down the honour and integrity of many who are trapped in its turning.

I have been trapped too, but I refuse to be ground down. I continue to believe in honour, I believe the current judge is a man of integrity, and I believe that in November at long last I will be free.

It will be the strangest of times. I am perhaps too proud of my clean disciplinary record over 28 years in prison.

However, the nearest I ever came to being guilty of an infraction was when I was ticked off by a guard: I gave Marita two kisses at the end of our weekend meeting, rather than one.

Imagine a world where kissing your wife will no longer be against the law!

• Kris Maharaj, October 31, 2014.

Kris Maharaj's views do not necessarily represent those of ITV News.