Prime Minister Portia Simpson Miller, fulfilling a promise that could improve her political stocks, has commissioned a legal study of court documents from the United States trial of Marcus Garvey, hoping to find that the National Hero was unfairly convicted of mail fraud.

Indicating she was serious about clearing Garvey’s name, Simpson Miller put the project into the hands of one of Jamaica’s brightest legal minds, Professor Stephen Vasciannie who works out of the Attorney-General’s chambers.

Vasciannie is now pouring over the 1,400-page transcript of the trial made available by Verene Shepherd, head of the state-run Jamaica National Heritage Trust (JNHT).

“There are some who believe strongly that Mr Garvey was convicted of mail fraud on trumped-up charges and we are looking for evidence of whether the trial was fair or not,” Vasciannie told the Observer.

Vasciannie’s task will be made more onerous because he will also have to investigate claims that Garvey was also convicted of a crime in Jamaica, although legal documentary proof of that has been hard to come by so far.

Journalist Beverley Hamilton, a staunch Garveyite, said Garvey was indeed convicted in Jamaica but later pardoned by then Prime Minister Edward Seaga on August 17, 1987, the 100th anniversary of the hero’s birth.

“Garvey had issued his political manifesto, which had as its 10th plank his intention to impeach judges who did their job unfairly,” said Hamilton. “He was convicted and jailed for three months, a period which coincided with local elections, thus preventing him from campaigning. He also lost his seat on the municipal council, based on a rule about being absent for three consecutive meetings.”

Vasciannie, who is assisted in his task by lawyers in the International Division of the Attorney-General’s Department, said: “If in fact Mr Garvey was convicted of a crime here, we would, of course, have to set our house in order first.”

Declared Jamaica’s first National Hero after an illustrious though controversial international career, Marcus Mosiah Garvey, founder of the wildly successful Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), was brought low by the charge of mail fraud, for which he was tried and found guilty in the United States in May 1923. He was deported after serving a part of his five-year sentence.

Although there has been a strong lobby for Garvey to be granted a US presidential pardon, most Garveyites contend that a pardon assumes guilt. They argue fiercely that he was innocent of the charge and want the conviction struck down.

Garvey’s work to unite Blacks everywhere put him on a collision course with the US establishment, and when he was charged with mail fraud under the American Securities Act, his UNIA followers – which at its peak numbered millions across the globe – immediately believed the charge was fraudulent.

The Jamaican had established a shipping company – the Black Star Line – to help empower black people. According to the court documents, Garvey wrote letters to people inviting them to invest in the venture by buying shares, but he never followed the legal procedures prescribed by the Securities Act, thus constituting fraud using the mail. There were also suggestions that the share price he asked was too high.

Vasciannie said that one of the arguments that had to be considered was whether Garvey, if he had done as charged by the US, was just a bad businessman without any bad intent.

“We are currently planning our strategy as to how we will approach the United States, based on our findings from the transcript,” he said.

In the increasing body of work on the life and times of Marcus Mosiah Garvey, scholars portray the Jamaican Hero as a man way ahead of his time.

Garvey was born in St Ann’s Bay, the youngest of 11 children. He started working at age 14 in his godfather’s printing business in Kingston. But he would go on to become a phenomenon in his relatively short 52 years, with his accomplishments including the creation of the world’s largest black political organisation (UNIA); the first and one of the largest black-owned multinational businesses (the Black Star Line); and founding of several newspapers.

One of his most enduring themes was the role of entrepreneurship in improving the economic status of Blacks. “A race that is solely dependent upon another for its economic existence sooner or later dies,” he is quoted as saying.

Garvey died in London on June 10, 1940 and 24 years later his remains were brought home by the Jamaican government, which declared him a National Hero and reinterred his bones at National Heroes Park in downtown Kingston.

Watch the Observer for excerpts of the transcript of the Garvey mail fraud trial in the United States.