The stocking strangler hit first in September 1977, when he raped and killed Ferne Jackson, aged 60.

Over the following months, he struck six more times. All his victims were elderly and white. All were sexually assaulted and strangled, usually with one of their own stockings. The cops were at a complete loss.

Columbus had always been a relatively safe place, certainly if you were white.

About an hour from Atlanta, it is the second city of Georgia, not much bigger than Cork. Its only real claim to fame is the location on its outskirts of Fort Benning, one of the US army's largest barracks, from where soldiers are frequently transferred to foreign wars.

From early on, it looked as if race was going to be a factor in the stocking-strangler case. After one of the murders, the city coroner told reporters that fibres found on the body were "negroid pubic hairs". It mattered not that the coroner was an eccentric, with no scientific training. He had provided grist to the mill.

Six years later, following a lead that may have involved a bizarre telephone call "from God", Columbus police got a breakthrough. Carlton Gary, a 32-year-old petty criminal who'd been in and out of jail for most of his adult life, was charged.

The evidence was almost entirely circumstantial. A witness, another elderly lady who had survived attack, identified him as her assailant, only after his face had been flashed across TV as the main suspect. The defence team was denied funds because Gary had retained a specialist in death-penalty cases rather than a courtappointed lawyer.

A jury of 10 whites and two blacks convicted Gary in jig time and he was sentenced to death. Since 1986, he has been on death row, exhausting appeals.

For some, the case had echoes of Columbus's past in relation to justice dispensed to blacks. In what is now a southern clich�, William Faulkner once wrote that in the south, "the past is never dead, it's not even past".

One black lawyer, Gary Parker, who left the city after the stocking-strangler case, says the past is very much alive when issues of race and justice collide. "The crime happens, " Parker says. "The mob gathers. All too often, the question is: which nigger's neck are we going to put the noose around?"

David Rose, an English journalist who has written extensively about miscarriages of justice, came to the case a decade ago.

He was writing about the death penalty and Gary's plight prompted him to dig deeper into the case.

What he found points to a blatant miscarriage of justice. He doesn't say specifically that he believes Gary to be innocent of the crime, but he presents copious character evidence on behalf of Gary. And he is adamant that the man never received a fair trial, that his case resonates with the type of justice that was dispensed by lynch mobs in the city less than 100 years ago.

The past in Columbus was not pretty.

"One of the most odious aspects of the ethnic terror of the 1860s was the maiming and murder of African Americans by the same individuals who had once owned them as property, and who seemed unable to adjust to the fact that if they still wished to put their former slaves to work, they would have to pay them."

The racial tension was ratcheted up by what has come to be known as the "southern rape complex" in which women's status was "exalted to an extraordinary and bizarre degree while their virtue was seen as at constant risk from the marauding, violating power of black sexuality".

Thus, Simon Adams was thrown in a river and shot to death in the city in 1900 after attempting to burgle his white employer. His main crime was entering the house through his employer's daughter's bedroom.

Another lynching in 1912 involved 14-yearold Teasy McElhaney, who accidently shot white boy Cedron Land while playing. A jury found the boy innocent of murder but guilty of manslaughter. As he was being led from the court, the mob took over, carted McElhaney outside the city limits and shot him to death.

The Land family is one of Columbus's oldest. "One of the lynch members in McElhaney's case was Brewster, Cedron Land's uncle. Brewster's son John in turn trod a well-worn path from prosecutor to judge in the city and was involved in the preliminary trial of Carlton Gary in 1986, denying the defendant funds for his defence."

Rose tracked down the retired Land in 2001 and in an amazing interview, the judge admitted that the cops may have got the wrong man. "Sometimes [in high-profile cases] the cops aren't too much bothered whether they got the right guy as long as they got someone? I was never 100% convinced that Carlton Gary was guilty and I'm still not."

Rose sifts through the evidence of Gary's trial and unearths a shocking vista that one hopes would never have been tolerated by a court on this side of the Atlantic. But it is also the vignettes about the atmosphere around the court that present a compelling picture of justice at work.

One cop whom the author interviewed recalled that, at the trial's end, the judge invited prosecuting counsel and the investigating cops into his chambers for a celebratory drink. The cop, Michael Sellars, recalls the judge, Kenneth Followill, declaring to the gathering: "Anyone got a birthday or anything special coming up? We'll make that the execution date."

What resonates most in this compelling book is the basic traits that can be applied to nearly all miscarriages of justice today, whether or not race is involved. Rose reasserts the importance of the adversarial criminal-justice process.

"Its underlying premise is that beliefs and gut feelings should have no place in deciding whether a human being ought to be punished, let alone killed, for a crime they may have committed. What counts is evidence, fairly presented and cross examined."

He admits that change has come to Columbus, albeit slowly, even in the decade he has been visiting the city. Mixed couples can now walk down the street without being attacked. Prosperity has blurred the previously stark racial socio-economic lines and even the Big Eddy Club, a focal point for the city's elite which features prominently in this account, has admitted its first African American.

But the past isn't dead. He's sitting on death row, where he has been for the last 20 years, a victim of what appears to have been the paradoxical process of a lynching within the law.

'Violation - Justice, Race and Serial Murder in the Deep South' by David Rose is published by Harper Press