Last hope for Death Row woman

- St Kitts-born woman says she was framed

Jamaica Observer

Friday, August 13, 2010

LONDON, United Kingdom – British campaigners are making a last ditch attempt to stop the execution of a St Kitts and Nevis-born woman on death row in the United States.

Linda Carty, 51, a British citizen, is due to be executed by lethal injection in Texas for the murder of a woman nine years ago.

Carty has always protested her innocence but she could be given the lethal injection within weeks after the US Supreme Court refused to review the murder conviction campaigners say resulted from a “catastrophically flawed” trial.

“Linda faces execution very soon now,” said Clive Stafford Smith, director of the legal action charity, Reprieve.

“There is no lonelier place than a death row cell, and no greater power imbalance than that between a condemned prisoner and the government that wants to kill them. I encourage visitors to enter Death's Waiting Room and imagine yourself in Linda's position. I'm sure it will be an unforgettable experience,” Smith said of the exhibition in Central London that replicates Carty's death row cell.

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 in Texas. Her body was found in the trunk of a car.

Two trial witnesses testified that 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 defence case based on one 15-minute meeting with the accused, the jury found her guilty and condemned her to death.

Carty claims she was framed over the murder, by the men who carried out the abduction, because of her earlier work as an informant for the US Drug Enforcement Agency.

Reprieve claims Carty was given an “incompetent defence lawyer” during the original trial who, among other alleged failings, neglected to inform the British government so it could intervene on her behalf.

In addition, the British Foreign Office complained of “ineffective counsel” in court filings it made under the last government in support of Carty.

Carty was born in St Kitts in 1959, and lived there as a British Overseas Territories Citizen until she was 23. She moved to Houston, Texas, with her family in the early 1980s.