Linda Carty: 'someone is trying to take my life for someone else's crime'

Linda Carty (left), a British woman on death row in America, says that her last hope may be an appeal for clemency by David Cameron.

Gatesville is a tiny town miles from anywhere, deep in the heart of Texas, four hours drive north of Houston. There is little to it but a Wal-Mart, a drive-in movie theatre and two enormous prisons. One of the jails looming out of the flat landscape is called Mountain View. But there is no mountain, and from the prison's death row, there is no view.

This is where, in all probability, Linda Carty, the only British woman on death row in America, is living out her last weeks and months. Carty has been on death row in Texas for the past nine years, accused of murdering a young mother in order to steal her baby. Any day now, without warning, her execution date will be handed down by the authorities, following a decision by the US supreme court last month to reject her final appeal.

Sitting behind bulletproof glass inside one of Mountain View's characterless concrete buildings last week, she seemed to vacillate between residual hope and growing despair. "Waiting for my execution date to come down just makes me feel like an object. But this is a human being sitting here," Carty told the Observer, raising her softly Caribbean-lilted voice in exasperation.

Time is running out for her. Born on the island of St Kitts before it gained independence from Britain, Carty kept her British citizenship and passport after moving to Houston when she was 23. Following the supreme court ruling, she now faces the prospect of lethal injection within as little as three months, in a case that has British officials seething. They argue that international diplomatic agreements and simple justice have been trampled in the drive to get her into the busy Texan death chamber.

Her execution would be a grim denouement to a peculiar and astonishing case. In 2001 the body of Joana Rodriguez, 25, was found in the boot of a car being used by Carty. Rodriguez, Carty's neighbour, had been bound and gagged with duct tape and had suffocated. Just four days earlier she had given birth to a boy. The baby was found unharmed.

Carty was not in the car and claims she lent it to a man she knew who, entirely without her knowledge, took a band of thugs to attack Rodriguez in a robbery that went fatally wrong. She has a self-confessed history of association with some shady men – it was what attracted the US Drug Enforcement Agency to recruit her as an undercover operative when she was still in her 20s.

She has had a complicated life. But even the DEA stated at one of her appeals that it didn't believe she was a murderer. However, Carty was accused of hiring the gang to attack Rodriguez and steal her baby because she was desperate to keep her boyfriend following a traumatic series of miscarriages.

The man she'd lent the car to was shot dead in a gangland killing in the runup to Carty's trial. His four co-accused, whom she insists she had never met, testified at their trial that Carty contracted them. They were not convicted of murder. She was.

"My trial counsel didn't bother to present a case. I didn't want anyone's baby. Do you go around accusing every woman who has a miscarriage of trying to steal someone's baby? This conviction is the most degrading thing. As a mother myself I feel so sorry for the lady who lost her life. Now someone is trying to take my life for someone else's crime," she said.

UK legal campaigners call the conduct of her case "catastrophically flawed" but admit that the odds are stacked against her in a state that is ruthless even by contemporary US standards. Last week, Carty appealed to the prime minister, David Cameron, to intervene personally and save her life. From the austere interview booth at Mountain View, Carty pleaded for help: "Now that Mr Cameron has settled in, he needs to play a much larger role if Texas is not to kill an innocent British person," she said.

"I'm not asking Mr Cameron to give me a 'get-out-of-jail free' card, I'm asking for help to get the opportunity to present my arguments with the right counsel," the 52-year-old mother of one said, nervously fingering her neat plait of hair draped over her white prison-issue overalls.

When she was arrested in 2001, the British consulate in Houston was not informed of the arrest, as it should have been in accordance with UK-US bilateral agreements. Then Carty was assigned Jerry Guerinot as a public defender. Guerinot has one of the worst records in the US for saving his clients from execution. He met her for just 15 minutes and failed to call defence witnesses at her trial.

"A decent lawyer would certainly not have let her face the death penalty and would have had a good chance of getting her acquitted," said Sophie Walker, a lawyer with the British legal action charity Reprieve. Reprieve's founder, Clive Stafford Smith, says Carty's case is a most desperate, outrageous miscarriage of justice. No forensic science evidence was presented and there were no witnesses who saw her do anything connected with the crime.

The supreme court rejected her appeal, even though the federal appeals court had indicated "deficiencies" in the handling of the case. The ruling clears the way for her execution date to be set. "How can you put somebody to death when the evidence is inconclusive – surely that's more than reasonable doubt?" Carty pleaded. Last autumn, a campaigner raised a life-size photograph of her on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square. It showed Carty as a young primary school teacher in St Kitts, where she once sang a solo for Prince Charles. "We all thought of ourselves as extensions of Britain, the motherland," she said.

At Mountain View, Carty is allowed limited association with the other women, all convicted murderers. They have some time to knit and sew, watch television and exercise each day in a yard within the intimidating complex, where the bunker-like buildings are punctuated with slit windows and wreathed in wire, with guard towers on every corner. She is not able to touch her visitors, who include her daughter Jovelle, now 30, who visits from her home in Houston, and her 70-year-old mother, Enid. She's not allowed visits from her grandsons, Jovelle's boys, aged four and two.

"It's hell," she said of her day-to-day existence on death row.

Last month Jovelle flew to London to lobby ministers. Paul Lynch, the British consul general in Houston, calls Carty's conviction "a terrible failure of the system".

Texas has carried out [460] executions since America restored the death penalty in 1976, more than a third of the US total. Two men are due to be executed in Texas this week. Rick Perry, the Texas governor, has granted clemency in one capital case in his nine years in office, while allowing 200 executions to go ahead. Carty and her team know the chances of a reprieve are vanishingly slim.

"Texas is addicted to execution. It's a political gimmick in this state, to look tough and get re-elected, and to play on the public's fear of crime," she said bitterly. One legal source said that remaining channels being pursued now were just "time-wasting exercises" to stave off Carty's execution. Ironically, the source indicated, it's only when Carty is handed her execution date that Cameron is at all likely to become involved. "We are hoping he will try to meet Rick Perry," the source said.

Carty is fearful. She still has hope, and is determined to fight her case, even beyond the execution chamber. Her voice lowered and cracked a little. "If the worse comes to the worst, I still want my family to fight to clear my name after I'm dead," she said.

Source: The Guardian, June 27, 2010