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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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Texas: Linda Carty's last hope for clemency

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As Teresa Lewis is set to become the first woman to be executed in the US for five years, Briton Linda Carty continues to await the same fate for killing a young mother in Texas. Peter Marshall meets Carty, a St Kitts-born grandmother, and investigates why campaigners say her 2002 trial was flawed.

Since the death penalty was restored in Texas in 1982, the US state has put to death 462 people. Just three of them were women.

Next in line for the lethal injection in America's busiest execution chamber is British grandmother Linda Carty.

The 51-year-old, born in a former British colony in the Caribbean, stands convicted of the kidnap and murder of Joana Rodriguez - seized with her four-day-old son by three men involved in a drugs gang in May 2001.

The baby was later discovered unharmed in a car, but Ms Rodriguez was found suffocated with duct tape on her mouth and a plastic bag over her head.

Carty, convicted and sentenced to death in 2002 for ordering the crime, has always maintained her innocence. But after the US Supreme Court refused to review her case earlier this year, she is now facing execution.


Source: BBC News,September 22, 2010
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