Death Penalty News

Taylor Parker is set to become the 7th woman on death row in Texas, following her sentencing Wednesday in Bowie County for the capital murder of Reagan Hancock and the kidnapping her unborn baby, Braxlynn Sage. The baby did not survive. The last woman to be handed a death sentence in the state was Kimberly Cargill in June 2012 for the slaying of her developmentally disabled babysitter in Smith County, who was set to testify against her in a custody battle. None of the women currently on death row in Texas are scheduled for execution. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, 6 women have been executed in Texas since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, more than any other state, according to Death Penalty Information Center. The last woman to be executed in the U.S. was Lisa Montgomery in January 2021. It was the first execution of a female inmate carried out by the federal government since 1953, and her case is chillingly reminiscent of Parker’s. She wa...

Dan Vasquez used to push the lever on the gas chamber, or the “coughing box,” as it was known on death row. As California's state executioner he stared into the eyes of condemned men while they passed to the next world. “They try to hold their breath, but it seeps in through the pores,” he told The Sunday Telegraph. “It takes seven seconds. The head rolls forward, and then they flatline. One told me 'Everyone will dance with the grim reaper'.” It is 25 years since Mr Vasquez, now retired, poisoned someone with hydrogen cyanide. He is still a supporter of the death penalty. But even he now admits its days are probably numbered. “Does it stop murders? No. Is it a deterrent? No,” he said. “If the politicians get more votes by opposing it, then they’re going to do that. Maybe it will be abolished.” Across America in 2019 that is exactly what is happening. Last week New Hampshire became the latest state to repeal its death penalty in what campaigners haile...

The Supreme Court last week turned down an appeal from a British woman sentenced to die for a Harris County murder-kidnapping, moving the case one step closer to a possible execution date. Linda Carty was sent to death row in 2001 after she was convicted of masterminding a plot to murder her 20-year-old neighbor and steal the woman's baby in order to save her own common-law marriage. In the years since the killing of Joana Rodriguez, Carty has consistently professed her innocence, insisting she was railroaded by prosecutors who failed to turn over evidence and coerced witnesses to win a conviction. Yet the nation's highest court has now turned down her most recent appeal without comment, refusing to review the argument that the combination of bad lawyering and "egregious prosecutorial misconduct" was enough to make a difference in the outcome of the case. READ MORE: Judge rejects appeal from British woman on Texas death row  The now 60-year-old ...

Linda Carty Accusations of prosecutorial misconduct, hidden information in 2002 trial rejected A district court judge ruled Thursday that Harris County prosecutors did not engage in misconduct or hide information that would have changed the outcome of Linda Carty's 2002 capital murder trial. Attorneys for Carty, a British citizen and grandmother, had argued that the death-row inmate should be granted a new trial and sentencing hearing. They contended witness statements hidden for 14 years proved that her conviction was based on flawed testimony used to portray her as the mastermind of a kidnapping and murder plot in 2001. But Judge David Garner, a Galveston-based visiting judge, found prosecutors had overwhelming evidence of Carty's guilt from multiple other sources. Although he found that some witness statements should have been turned over to her original defense attorneys before her 2002 trial, he also ruled that the material likely would not have altered the...

Junto al nicaragüense Bernardo Tercero, cuya ejecución está programada para el miércoles de esta semana, hay otros 21 extranjeros en el corredor de la muerte en Texas, en su mayoría mexicanos y centroamericanos, aunque también los hay de Sudamérica, Asia y el Caribe. Si nada lo impide, al nicaragüense lo ejecutarán el miércoles a las seis de la tarde locales en la cárcel de Huntsville, la más antigua de Texas y en la que ya han sido ajusticiados 13 extranjeros desde marzo de 1993, cuando el dominicano Carlos Santana murió a manos de sus verdugos. Tercero fue condenado por asesinar a otro hombre en 1997 durante un atraco en una lavandería de Houston, crimen por el que ha pasado los últimos 15 años de su vida en el temido corredor de la muerte de Texas, ubicado en la cárcel de Polunsky. Once mexicanos y tres salvadoreños, entre otros Además de Tercero, en Texas están condenados a muerte 11 mexicanos, tres salvadoreños, dos hondureños, un argentino, un dominicano, un vi...

Linda Carty A Texas court has today granted British death row grandmother Linda Carty a new hearing to assess recently discovered evidence in her case. The evidentiary hearing, granted by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, will assess evidence that the key witnesses in Linda’s trial lied on the witness stand because they were threatened by the prosecutor into testifying against her. The new evidence was unearthed by lawyers at international human rights charity Reprieve following years of investigation. Among the witnesses is Christopher Robinson, the only person who claimed to have seen Linda (56) carry out the murder of Joanna Rodriguez. Christopher Robinson has now admitted that Texas District Attorneys (DAs) “threatened me and intimidated me” into identifying Linda as the culprit. Mr Robinson, who was the key to the prosecution case, admits that he never saw Linda kill anyone and his testimony to this extent at trial was a lie. Mr Robinson has signed an affidavit...

The case of the first woman to be executed in Virginia for a century highlights America's death row shame by Alex Hannaford On 23 September, 40-year-old Teresa Lewis will become the first woman to be executed in the state of Virginia for almost a century. She'll also be the first woman put to death in the US since 2005. Considering that, in the intervening five years, around 220 men will have been executed, it puts it into perspective: executing women is unusual. Of more than 1,200 executions carried out since the US supreme court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 were of women. And each time that happens, it's stunningly bad PR for an increasingly unpopular facet of the American justice system. The facts of the Lewis case are fairly gruesome. In 2002, she was convicted of persuading two men to kill her husband and stepson to collect a $250,000 life insurance policy. In return, she promised them a portion of the money, and sex with her and her 16-year-old d...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday upheld death sentences for 2 Texas inmates, including a man accused of leading a gang responsible for several murders, and refused to reconsider the case of a British grandmother condemned for killing a woman and kidnapping her newborn son. Dexter Darnell Johnson, 22, was convicted of the June 2006 shooting deaths of a young couple during a carjacking. Investigators said the Houston man was the ringleader of a group responsible for dozens of robberies and at least four homicides. The justices also upheld the conviction of Max Soffar, 54, for a shooting rampage at a bowling alley that killed 3 people in 1980. The court also refused to rehear its rejection of an appeal from Linda Carty, a 51-year-old British grandmother convicted of murdering her neighbor and taking the victim's 4-day-old son in 2001. Carty maintains her innocence, but prosecutors said she was desperate to have child after a miscarriage. The infant was found unharmed. Carty is amo...

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 chara...

Daughter pleads for clemency as Briton convicted in controversial murder trial exhausts legal appeals. A 51-year-old British grandmother could be killed by lethal injection in less than three months unless her family and campaigners succeed in a last-ditch attempt to gain clemency from the governor of Texas. Linda Carty , a drug enforcement agency undercover agent, has spent the last eight years on death row after being convicted of planning a macabre murder. The supreme court has now refused to reopen Carty's case, which means all legal avenues have been exhausted. Execution dates are generally set from one to six months from this stage, with two to three months being typical. Carty, who was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts when it was a British colony, was found guilty of hiring four men to murder her 25-year-old neighbour, Joana Rodriguez, so that Carty could cut the baby out of Rodriguez's womb and claim the child as her own. That Rodriguez had given birth four...

A good way to end up on death row in Texas is to be accused of a capital crime and have Jerry Guerinot represent you. 20 of Mr. Guerinot's clients have been sentenced to death. That is more people than are awaiting execution in about 1/2 of the 35 states that have the death penalty. "People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty," Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has said. So what is Mr. Guerinot's secret? It seems to boil down to a failure to conduct even rudimentary investigations, said David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston and the litigation director of the Texas Defender Service, which represents death row inmates, including not a few of Mr. Guerinot’s former clients. "He doesn't even pick the low-hanging fruit which is hitting him in the head as he's walking under the tree," Mr. Dow said. Mr. Guerinot did not respond to two messages seeking comment. In 2007, he told The Observer, a London newspaper, ...

The Supreme Court has refused to review the case of a British woman sentenced to death for killing a Houston mother and stealing her baby in 2001. The justices rejected an appeal from Linda Carty , who complained her trial lawyers were deficient. Carty, 51, was found guilty of capital murder in February 2002. She is one of 10 women on Texas death row. The British government and anti-death penalty groups have taken up her cause. Carty, who claims she had ineffective counsel and maintains her innocence, was optimistic before the ruling. Texas officials will now set an execution date and Carty, a British citizen, will become the only woman to have a slot on the state's execution calendar. It could be years before she's actually put to death. It is rare for women to get the death penalty in the United States and even rarer for them to be put death. Fifty-four women are on death row and in the modern era (1973 to 2009) of the death penalty, only 11 women have been executed. Rea...

Supreme Court may decide today whether it will take her appeal. Twenty-year-old Joana Rodriguez had just given birth days earlier when four men busted into her Houston apartment on May 16, 2001, pistol-whipped her husband and abducted her and her newborn. Rodriguez's body was later found in the trunk of a car with a plastic bag over her head. Her arms and legs were bound with duct tape and her mouth and nose also had been covered with tape. An autopsy revealed she suffocated. Authorities said Linda Anita Carty (pictured), a neighbor, plotted the kidnapping because she wanted Rodriguez's baby in a desperate attempt to keep her common-law husband. Carty, who was found guilty of capital murder in February 2002, is now fighting for her life as one of 10 women on Texas death row. The 51-year-old grandmother has a petition before the U.S. Supreme Court, which is expected to announce today whether it will hear her case seeking a new trial. Her chances are slim. The high court de...