GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT

When Alex Stone logged onto a chatroom for the blind three years ago, he little realised he was unleashing a chain of events that would see him extradited to America in handcuffs and shackles on a maximum security private jet. Stone, 34, has just returned from the US, having spent more than six months in jail on remand before an assault charge against him was dropped. Worryingly, he was extradited under laws set up to deal with terrorists that mean America can in effect remove a UK citizen from British soil “on demand” without having to prove there is a valid case.

He is now joining 150 MPs being mobilised by the Tory frontbencher Boris Johnson in a campaign to overturn the 2003 Extradition Act, which has also been used to try to extradite the three British businessmen accused over the collapse of Enron. The law replaces the age-old rule under which American prosecutors had to show there was a prima facie case when asking British courts to extradite. British courts do not have the same power to extradite American suspects, as that would break the terms of the American constitution, which demands that the requesting country shows “probable cause” that the proposed extraditee is guilty of the crime in question. Ironically, the treaty was signed by Britain’s blind home secretary, David Blunkett.

The problems began when Stone, who has been blind from birth, met 20-year-old Alma — from the incongruously named Liberty, Missouri — on www.blindkiss.com in 2003, which proclaims it “explodes the notion that being blind is some kind of living death”. “I suppose I was kind of lonely,” says Stone, who returned to Britain 12 days ago. “She was lovely, really fun, and we got on so well.” They began to talk on the telephone and, in August 2003, Stone went to stay with Alma and her young child from another relationship. “We had so much fun,” says Stone, from Tooting, south London. “We had fallen in love. We were talking about marriage.”

Stone decided to move to America to be with Alma. Two weeks after he arrived, however, her 14-month-old child was taken to hospital and found to have suffered broken bones. “It transpired that the family and the local police decided that it must have been me who had done it.” He was advised by his American lawyer to return to Britain, because he had not been arrested or charged with a crime. Naively, perhaps, Stone, who has no previous convictions, hoped this would be the end of his matter. Estranged from Alma, who would not speak to him, and nursing a broken heart, he tried to fit back into his old life as a computer programmer, contacting a British lawyer as a precaution.

“I knew that I had not harmed the child, and I imagined that in order to be extradited somewhere, there had to be some burden of proof,” he says. But in November 2004 he was horrified to discover that British police were looking for him. He turned himself in and was extradited under the new laws after three hearings at Bow Street magistrates’ court. “There appeared to be no defence to extradition and no evidence at all was presented,” he says. “I had thought that would be a requirement. When I realised what was happening, I was really, really scared.”

In April 2005 Stone found himself transferred by the Gatwick extradition squad onto a jet with three other British subjects, also being removed and guarded by American marshals, some of the 12 suspects who have been extradited to the US since the law change. Another 31 American requests are being processed. Having been transferred across America and kept in various “holding cells”, Stone ended up in jail in Missouri. There he was kept alone in a cell for 23 hours a day, unable to communicate with the outside world except in a monthly telephone call home and frighteningly isolated because of his disability.

After an appeal to the British consulate he was given a scanner that he was able to use to input letters from home into his voice-enabled laptop, so that he could “read” them. No printer was forthcoming, however, so he was unable to reply to concerned friends. “Being in prison was very difficult,” says Stone, who rarely refers to his lack of sight. “It was very boring. There was nothing I could do, I listened to a little radio, and once a day you were allowed out for a shower. Emotionally, it was horribly depressing. I didn’t know how long I would be there, and it began to seem never-ending.”

Visits from his parents Colin and Celia, a solicitor and retired teacher, were “strangely meaningless”, he says. “They had to talk to me over a telephone and from behind glass. For me, they might just have well been on another continent.” His father says: “It was horrific. Alex was effectively held in solitary confinement for six months. When we went to see him, we weren’t allowed to touch or hug him.” Eventually the family secured bail for Stone and he lived in a motel from the end of 2005. He describes the “huge relief” of walking into the fresh air for the first time in more than six months. “Just feeling the air on my face, being able to walk more than eight paces ahead after all that time in a 6 x 8ft cell, it was heaven.”

The other monumental relief for the family was the emergence of evidence indicating that Stone could not have injured his girlfriend’s child. Expert witnesses on both sides had already asserted that the injuries predated his arrival in America. At the end of last year another child in the family, with whom Stone had had no contact, was found to have suffered similar injuries. The child’s grandmother decided she would testify on Stone’s behalf. Stone was subsequently asked by prosecutors to take a polygraph test, which he passed. He was presented with the option of pleading guilty to the minor offence of leaving the country during a police investigation, in exchange for the assault charge — which carried a penalty of 10-30 years’ imprisonment — being dropped.

Stone’s lawyer, Michael Caplan QC, at Kingsley Napley, said the manner in which he was treated was most irregular. “No longer do the American authorities have to provide prima facie evidence for extradition, but what is also of concern is what happened to Alex Stone when he was returned to the US,” he says. “By proceeding with this other offence, for which he was not extradited, the Americans may well have been in breach of the ‘specialty arrangement’ under the extradition treaty, which is there to protect people when they are extradited.”

On the last day of February this year Stone was sentenced to 179 days in prison, time he had already served, and his father came to collect him from the US. He has come to regret deeply finding the BlindKiss website, with its banner proclaiming: “It’s all going to be OK now!” “It is very difficult to prove you haven’t done something,” says Stone, who has had no contact with Alma since the family made the allegations. “This has robbed me of 2½ years of my life and cost me around 50,000 pounds — money I will not get back. I feel angry about it, but most of all, I feel very sad.”

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