A visit with Linda Carty – British grandmother on death row in Texas

During the visit, Linda told her story:

Linda Carty is sitting in a condemned cell on Death Row in Texas waiting to die. Linda is now fifty one and she has spent more than eight years in a condemned cell, sometimes shackled in a cage when visited by her family. What has kept her going – and extraordinarily youthful – is the dream of one day walking free and clearing her name. All she wants is to be reunited with her loved ones again – and to hug her two young grandchildren that she is not even allowed to see.

Her execution will take place later this year unless there is a worldwide campaign to save her. She will die by lethal injection in a horrific theatre of death watched by her beloved family. She is the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice suffered by a British citizen in recent times.

When Linda thinks back on her life she finds it difficult to believe it is ending in such heartbreak for her and her family. She was born in the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in 1959. She had a very happy childhood. She did well at school, was very religious – she loved singing gospel songs – and in her late teens she became the village schoolteacher.

She fell in love with the local policeman got pregnant and had a baby outside of marriage. The father soon left. But Linda loved being a mum and adored her beautiful daughter Jovelle. She made the best of it. In the late 1970s Linda’s whole family – a very big one – move to Houston in Texas to live.

Linda’s life soon became even more dramatic. She enrolled at Houston University to study pharmacy but she was raped in the university car park, became pregnant and gave the baby up for adoption. But her spirit was not broken. She later worked for the police as an informer, helping to convict dangerous drug gangs. It was this secret work – which mad her many powerful enemies – that she believes led to her downfall.

In 2001 Linda was convicted of a horrific crime of which she has always proclaimed her innocence. She was accused of conspiring to murder one of her neighbors to abduct her new born baby. Her trial however was utterly flawed. The main evidence against her was given by the convicted criminals who carried out the murder. The flimsiest of evidence was allowed to stand because her defense lawyer – one of the worst in recent American history – failed to see her until two weeks before the trial. He was so disinterested in the case he failed to interrogate prosecution witnesses and to call to the stand those who would most certainly have saved Linda’s life.

This is a travesty that can happen to defendants who are poor and black in Texas. They are the ones who end up on death Row. But in Linda’s case the injustice was made worse by the fact that her British citizenship was never recognized by the Texan authorities. If it had, she would have been supported and saved by the British government and the British people.

But it is not too late to help Linda. Her last real chance of escaping the death sentence and getting the fair trial she deserves lies in the Supreme Court in Washington. The British government presents a plea for clemency in her case on February 26^th 2010 and the court makes a decision during the spring. 

source:Reprieve, Feb. 17, 2010