Raphael Rowe
Raphael Rowe (born March 1968) is a British investigative journalist and television presenter, born and raised in south-east London to parents of Jamaican and British heritage, who was wrongfully convicted at age 21 as one of the M25 Three for the 1988 murder of Peter Hurburgh during a burglary in Surrey and related armed robberies, receiving a life sentence despite the absence of forensic evidence linking him to the crimes.[1][2][3][4][5]Rowe served 12 years in maximum-security prisons before his conviction was quashed by the Court of Appeal in July 2000 due to evidential weaknesses and unreliable witness testimony.[6][7][4]
Upon release, he pursued journalism, joining the BBC less than a year later as a reporter for Radio 4's Today programme in 2001, advancing to cover the BBC One Six O'Clock News in 2003, produce undercover documentaries on BBC Two and Three addressing issues like knife crime and serial killers, and serve as a Panorama correspondent—the first of African-Caribbean descent and former prisoner in that role.[2][7][8]
Rowe later achieved prominence hosting Netflix's Inside the World's Toughest Prisons starting in 2018, embedding himself as an inmate in high-security facilities across countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazil, and the Philippines to expose systemic flaws in global incarceration.[7][9]