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Japan | Hakamada found religion, but then felt under attack by ‘the devil’

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Editor's note: This is the last in a four-part series on letters that Iwao Hakamada wrote while on death row. About a decade after cursing God, Iwao Hakamada was baptized Catholic at the Tokyo Detention House on Dec. 24, 1984. “Since I have been given the Christian name Paul, I am keenly feeling that I should be aware of the greatness of Paul.” (June 1985)

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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