Reply #20: Death-row inmate Linda Carty launches last-chance appeal to US Supreme Court

[Judi Lynn]

February 27, 2010
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.

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

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=7808642