Death-row inmate Linda Carty launches last-chance appeal to US Supreme Court

A British grandmother who once sang for the Prince of Wales faces death by lethal injection within months unless a final appeal launched yesterday can persuade the US Supreme Court that she deserves a second trial.

Linda Carty, a rape victim who says she was framed for murder by career criminals, has been on death row in central Texas since 2002. Her hopes of clemency depend on the Supreme Court accepting her case, and with it 80 bound briefing documents submitted by British campaigners and government lawyers. If it does not, she will almost certainly become the first black British woman to be executed in more than a century.

Carty was born in St Kitts, whose Prime Minister has described her as “a star who could have entered politics”. She now spends 23 hours a day in a cell in Gatesville, Texas, condemned to death after a trial described yesterday as “catastrophically flawed”, for a murder of which she has always proclaimed her innocence.

A “friend of the court” briefing by the British Government and delivered to the Supreme Court on Thursday, contends that Carty deserves a retrial because Texan authorities and her court-appointed lawyer failed to inform British officials of her arrest, as they were required to do by consular treaty. In another briefing submitted yesterday by a British documentary film-maker, Carty’s new lawyer — from a firm with close ties to both the former presidents Bush — is quoted as saying he will not be able to sleep at night “knowing that she could be killed without having had the chance of a fair trial”.

Appeals on her behalf to the Texas Supreme Court and a federal appeals court have already been turned down, even though both were supported by British claims similar to those submitted in Washington this week. The Supreme Court agrees to consider just one in 30 death penalty cases brought before it, campaigners say.

Carty was born on the eastern Caribbean island in 1959, and lived there as a British Overseas Territories Citizen until she was 23, teaching children with special needs and on one occasion singing a solo for the Prince of Wales.

She moved to Houston with her family in the early 1980s, but while studying for a pharmaceutical degree was raped in a Houston University car park. She fell pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption — and her life spiralled downward into a netherworld of drugs and petty crime, according to Steve Humphries, the filmmaker who has taken up her cause.

Carty was arrested in 2001 and charged with the murder of Joana Rodriguez, a tenant on the same floor of the apartment building where she lived. She had been found dead from suffocation in the boot of a car.

Two trial witnesses testified that Ms Rodriguez had been abducted by four men, whom prosecutors claimed Carty had hired to kill the younger woman for her newborn baby. Despite the lack of any forensic science evidence linking Carty to the crime, and a defense case based on one 15-minute meeting with the accused, the jury found her guilty and condemned her to death.

Jerry Guerinot, Carty’s court appointed attorney, has more clients on death row than any other lawyer in the US. He has denied negligence in Carty’s case but stands accused by Michael Goldberg, of the Houston firm now representing her free of charge, of failing to call any witnesses who might have exonerated her. These include a former Houston Drug Enforcement Agency officer for whom Carty had worked as an informant, who has said that he would have testified that she was no “cold-blooded murderer”.

Mr Guerinot obtained money from the state to travel to St Kitts but never went, according to Mr Goldberg. He also failed to challenge the prosecution’s claim that Carty intended to cut Ms Rodriguez’s baby from her womb, even though the baby had been born four days before the murder.

“I believed in the death penalty,” Mr Goldberg says in a nine-minute film submitted with Mr Humphries’s brief to the Supreme Court. “It’s just that this case was so outrageous.” The jury saw none of the evidence that might have spared Mr Guerinot’s client “because he did not get the job done, and this was a death penalty case”.

Paul Lynch, the British Consul-General in Houston, has called the Carty conviction “a terrible failure of the system”, from the moment the authorities failed to establish her citizenship or notify British officials. “In a further failure at the trial and before the trial, her defence lawyer should have gone to great lengths to find out what her nationality was. It didn’t happen.”

Martin Longden, a spokesman for the British Embassy in Washington, said the right to consular notification when British citizens were arrested in the US was “a point of principle for us” and “part of an individual’s right to a fair trial”. He emphasized that US citizens arrested in Britain were guaranteed the same rights.

The Supreme Court is expected to decide whether to hear the case within two months. If it does not, Carty could be executed as early as June, unless the Republican Governor of Texas, Rick Perry, intervenes. In nine years he has commuted the sentence of only one death row inmate on his own initiative, while signing death warrants for more than 200.

In the film submitted to the court by Mr Humphries, Carty sings Amazing Grace from behind a bullet-proof glass wall, and says through her tears: “If I have to die, I pray that my family will not feel ashamed because I was guilty, but [will] realize that the state of Texas failed me.”

By Giles Whittell

From The Times

February27,2010

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7043309.ece