Post by ScotKaren on Jun 21, 2006 13:05:32 GMT -5
'I'm not afraid of dying. I'm just angry'
Two years ago, Linda Carty was sentenced to death for her part in the kidnap and murder of a young woman. But British lawyers believe her conviction is unsafe and are mounting an appeal. Alex Hannaford talks to her on death row
Monday July 26, 2004
The Guardian
Forty miles north-west of Waco, somewhere between the two large Texas cities of Dallas and Austin, Highway 36 gets lost in the scenic hill country. There's the occasional Baptist church, a company selling "new and used trailer homes", and miles upon miles of fenced-off ranch land. The road eventually passes directly through Fort Hood, the biggest military base in the US and home to the largest troop of soldiers currently serving in Iraq. Soon afterwards you suddenly find yourself surrounded by high barbed-wire fences and watchtowers. Signs at the side of the road announce your arrival at the Dr Lane Murray Unit, the Hughes Unit and the Woodman Unit - three large penal establishments. Tucked away off an adjoining road and unsignposted from the main highway is the Mountain View Unit - otherwise known as "women's death row".
For the past two years, a 45-year-old British woman, Linda Carty, has been an inmate at Mountain View. She was arrested in 2001, and later sentenced to death by lethal injection for her part in the kidnapping and murder of 25-year-old Joana Rodriguez.
Three men had broken into Rodriguez's apartment and assaulted the woman's partner, Raymundo Cabrera. Rodriguez and her three-day-old baby Ray were then abducted, but the child was later found unharmed on the back seat of a car. His mother had suffocated after being hogtied with duct tape and left in the boot of the car with a plastic bag taped over her head. Although two eyewitnesses testified that they saw four men enter Rodriguez's apartment, and although there was no forensic evidence to link Carty to the crime, the prosecution alleged that she had killed the younger woman because she wanted to pass the baby off as her own after several miscarriages.
Carty has always denied any involvement, and, following her conviction in February 2002, is appealing. According to her legal team, this first appeal - a habeas corpus petition, at which new evidence may be introduced - is the most important. The appeal was initially due to take place late last year, but when it was discovered that Carty is British - she was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, then a British colony - her lawyers were given more time.
Carty's case has been taken up by Clive Stafford Smith, the British lawyer who has represented more than 200 people on death row and is currently among the lawyers representing British detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Stafford Smith believes Carty's conviction is unsafe and rests on the evidence of three career criminals who bore her a grudge; he also believes that the defence during her original trial was inadequate.
"Up until this point, no investigation had been done on her case of any meaningful nature," he says. "There are various appeals but if you screw up the first one you don't get another chance in real terms because it all becomes procedural. In Texas they just speed you on through to the death chamber." Stafford Smith now has until November 1 to mount an appeal.
In March this year, Stafford Smith, Vera Baird QC and Carty's 24-year-old daughter Jovelle Joubert gave a press briefing at the House of Commons, in which they called for parliamentary support.
Meanwhile, from behind bullet-proof glass at Mountain View's visitor room, Carty can only sit and hope. She looks surprisingly well for someone who has spent the past two years in one of the toughest penal systems in the country. Her hair is tied back and she has been allowed to wear some make-up. She also manages to smile, despite the fact that the unit warden is present throughout our interview, sitting a few feet away at the end of the empty room.
"When I was first arrested I said to myself it would all be over within 30 minutes - they had clearly made a mistake," she says. "I was interviewed for eight hours, six of those with no counsel present. I had a court-appointed attorney eventually but wasn't allowed home from the police station. I didn't really know I was being viewed as a suspect at first. I had no idea about the crime and didn't even know who the victim was."
Carty alleges that prosecution lawyers built a case in which it appeared that the victim was her next-door-neighbour; Rodriguez was frequently referred to as her "neighbour". In truth, she says, Rodriguez lived on the same floor of an apartment complex but the two had never met. Her lawyers also believe that her three co-accused - Chris Robinson, Gerald Anderson and Carlos Williams - had a motive to frame her. All three were convicted of aggravated kidnap but after detectives agreed not to pursue murder charges against them, they testified that Carty was behind the scheme. The three men received prison terms, but none was sent to death row.
Twenty years previously, Carty had been recruited as a confidential informant by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Houston. "Houston was being bombarded by Jamaican drug dealers at the time and the DEA needed someone of Caribbean background to work for them that no one would suspect," she explains. "A friend of mine at the Houston Police Department got me the job. It was interesting work and low-key for me but I had to take on the life of a drug dealer." At the same time she studied pharmacology at the University of Houston, and later worked part-time as a hairdresser.
Her work for the DEA helped land seizures of thousands of dollars' worth of narcotics and saw the imprisonment of scores of dealers. Stafford Smith believes that her work may have helped convict someone who Robinson, Anderson and Williams had been working for. "My lawyers believe these three men may have been drug 'burros' or mules," she says. "It was too difficult just to kill me, so they hatched this plot."
Carty claims her supervisor at the DEA was aware of the link with Robinson, Anderson and Williams, but that this was overlooked by Houston homicide detectives. Her former supervisor is now first on Stafford Smith's list of people to interview. "That," says Carty, "is their smoking gun."
As for the plot to kidnap the baby for herself, Carty believes the theory came from a woman who took her to hospital after a miscarriage, and later told police she believed the desire for children could have been Carty's motive. "They said I had a miscarriage and that got altered to mean I desperately wanted another baby. That is asinine to me because women can have children at 42 years of age, and I wasn't planning on having any more kids anyway. I had become pregnant accidentally."
After the verdict was read out, Carty says she went numb. "I was devastated and started shouting, 'I'm not guilty - I wasn't even there', but at the same time part of me accepted it because I'm also a pragmatist. If you have ineffective counsel and the state presents its case you can't get mad at the jury for making a ruling or a judgment based on what they've heard. Nobody was there to plant any reasonable doubt. None of my witnesses had been contacted and my family wasn't even interviewed." There are two people - whose names Carty will not reveal - who can, she says, provide the alibi she so desperately needed at her original trial.
Her original state-appointed attorney, Jerry Guerinot, has 21 former clients on death row - more than any other lawyer in the entire country. The state prosecutors who sought her conviction were the same lawyers she had been working alongsideat the DEA for the past 20 years.
When the death sentence was imposed, Carty says it was like a sharp pain running through her body. "I felt an awful sense of loss, betrayed by a government I had worked for for 20 years. I put my life on the line for them and I couldn't understand why this was happening to me. I remember being driven in the van straight to the Mountain View facility here in Gatesville.
"The further we drove away from that courtroom, the more distant I felt inside, like I would be forgotten. I was scared - suddenly I was on the other side of the sphere - but I never lost hope. I was assigned to a single cell: inside was a bed, commode, sink, table and a stool. I was now officially a ward of the state. I sat in there and went through everything I'd done in my life, asking why I was there, why me. Then the tears started to fall."
The Texas department of criminal justice has to record the citizenship of every new inmate. When it was discovered that Carty was a British citizen, Stafford Smith took on her case and informed the British consulate.
"I knew sooner or later that having aggressive attorneys on my case would unearth the truth," she says, "and the British government has taken a pivotal role in pursuing justice for me."
Carty describes herself as a very religious person, but she believes that if somebody has committed a crime they should be held responsible. She doesn't, however, agree with the death penalty. "I think that here in Texas it is a machine where prosecutors can boost their egos and their careers. They will use anything at their disposal to get you here and that is a travesty that needs to be corrected. There are too many innocent people on death row and nobody gives them a chance and nobody cares."
When I ask how she is treated inside, Carty looks over at the prison warden, smiles, and says, 'Fine.' However, a German-based internet site that Carty has written for tells a different story. After complaining to the warden about non-delivery of her mail, Carty wrote: "One morning, an officer came to my cell after my shower and slammed the steel gate directly into my back, physically hurting my body. When I yelped from the excruciating pain ... I asked why she had hit me. She replied, 'Well I say you hit me first and I am wearing the grey, you're in white, and I don't see anyone else that will go against an officer.' When I looked in the mirror there was a large, ugly, red and bluish welt on my shoulder blade. I am tired of the abuses and targeted punishment.
"I'm not really afraid of dying," Carty says now. "I'm just pissed off that somebody decided I was guilty when I am not. Evidence was concealed and manufactured to put me here. And the only two people that could have cleared me were not contacted."
Carty's daughter Jovelle, who is studying political science at the University of Houston, tries to visit her mother every week along with her grandmother, Carty's mother. "I am in a cell on my own for 23 hours a day," she says. "We get one hour's recreation and the option to have a shower. I read a lot, mostly romance novels, but I'm more focused on trying to get home.
"They expect you to sit in here and not get emotional but this is a state that terminates your life, and mine was terminated on speculation. It is not something you can ever really adjust to."
Two years ago, Linda Carty was sentenced to death for her part in the kidnap and murder of a young woman. But British lawyers believe her conviction is unsafe and are mounting an appeal. Alex Hannaford talks to her on death row
Monday July 26, 2004
The Guardian
Forty miles north-west of Waco, somewhere between the two large Texas cities of Dallas and Austin, Highway 36 gets lost in the scenic hill country. There's the occasional Baptist church, a company selling "new and used trailer homes", and miles upon miles of fenced-off ranch land. The road eventually passes directly through Fort Hood, the biggest military base in the US and home to the largest troop of soldiers currently serving in Iraq. Soon afterwards you suddenly find yourself surrounded by high barbed-wire fences and watchtowers. Signs at the side of the road announce your arrival at the Dr Lane Murray Unit, the Hughes Unit and the Woodman Unit - three large penal establishments. Tucked away off an adjoining road and unsignposted from the main highway is the Mountain View Unit - otherwise known as "women's death row".
For the past two years, a 45-year-old British woman, Linda Carty, has been an inmate at Mountain View. She was arrested in 2001, and later sentenced to death by lethal injection for her part in the kidnapping and murder of 25-year-old Joana Rodriguez.
Three men had broken into Rodriguez's apartment and assaulted the woman's partner, Raymundo Cabrera. Rodriguez and her three-day-old baby Ray were then abducted, but the child was later found unharmed on the back seat of a car. His mother had suffocated after being hogtied with duct tape and left in the boot of the car with a plastic bag taped over her head. Although two eyewitnesses testified that they saw four men enter Rodriguez's apartment, and although there was no forensic evidence to link Carty to the crime, the prosecution alleged that she had killed the younger woman because she wanted to pass the baby off as her own after several miscarriages.
Carty has always denied any involvement, and, following her conviction in February 2002, is appealing. According to her legal team, this first appeal - a habeas corpus petition, at which new evidence may be introduced - is the most important. The appeal was initially due to take place late last year, but when it was discovered that Carty is British - she was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, then a British colony - her lawyers were given more time.
Carty's case has been taken up by Clive Stafford Smith, the British lawyer who has represented more than 200 people on death row and is currently among the lawyers representing British detainees at Guantanamo Bay. Stafford Smith believes Carty's conviction is unsafe and rests on the evidence of three career criminals who bore her a grudge; he also believes that the defence during her original trial was inadequate.
"Up until this point, no investigation had been done on her case of any meaningful nature," he says. "There are various appeals but if you screw up the first one you don't get another chance in real terms because it all becomes procedural. In Texas they just speed you on through to the death chamber." Stafford Smith now has until November 1 to mount an appeal.
In March this year, Stafford Smith, Vera Baird QC and Carty's 24-year-old daughter Jovelle Joubert gave a press briefing at the House of Commons, in which they called for parliamentary support.
Meanwhile, from behind bullet-proof glass at Mountain View's visitor room, Carty can only sit and hope. She looks surprisingly well for someone who has spent the past two years in one of the toughest penal systems in the country. Her hair is tied back and she has been allowed to wear some make-up. She also manages to smile, despite the fact that the unit warden is present throughout our interview, sitting a few feet away at the end of the empty room.
"When I was first arrested I said to myself it would all be over within 30 minutes - they had clearly made a mistake," she says. "I was interviewed for eight hours, six of those with no counsel present. I had a court-appointed attorney eventually but wasn't allowed home from the police station. I didn't really know I was being viewed as a suspect at first. I had no idea about the crime and didn't even know who the victim was."
Carty alleges that prosecution lawyers built a case in which it appeared that the victim was her next-door-neighbour; Rodriguez was frequently referred to as her "neighbour". In truth, she says, Rodriguez lived on the same floor of an apartment complex but the two had never met. Her lawyers also believe that her three co-accused - Chris Robinson, Gerald Anderson and Carlos Williams - had a motive to frame her. All three were convicted of aggravated kidnap but after detectives agreed not to pursue murder charges against them, they testified that Carty was behind the scheme. The three men received prison terms, but none was sent to death row.
Twenty years previously, Carty had been recruited as a confidential informant by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Houston. "Houston was being bombarded by Jamaican drug dealers at the time and the DEA needed someone of Caribbean background to work for them that no one would suspect," she explains. "A friend of mine at the Houston Police Department got me the job. It was interesting work and low-key for me but I had to take on the life of a drug dealer." At the same time she studied pharmacology at the University of Houston, and later worked part-time as a hairdresser.
Her work for the DEA helped land seizures of thousands of dollars' worth of narcotics and saw the imprisonment of scores of dealers. Stafford Smith believes that her work may have helped convict someone who Robinson, Anderson and Williams had been working for. "My lawyers believe these three men may have been drug 'burros' or mules," she says. "It was too difficult just to kill me, so they hatched this plot."
Carty claims her supervisor at the DEA was aware of the link with Robinson, Anderson and Williams, but that this was overlooked by Houston homicide detectives. Her former supervisor is now first on Stafford Smith's list of people to interview. "That," says Carty, "is their smoking gun."
As for the plot to kidnap the baby for herself, Carty believes the theory came from a woman who took her to hospital after a miscarriage, and later told police she believed the desire for children could have been Carty's motive. "They said I had a miscarriage and that got altered to mean I desperately wanted another baby. That is asinine to me because women can have children at 42 years of age, and I wasn't planning on having any more kids anyway. I had become pregnant accidentally."
After the verdict was read out, Carty says she went numb. "I was devastated and started shouting, 'I'm not guilty - I wasn't even there', but at the same time part of me accepted it because I'm also a pragmatist. If you have ineffective counsel and the state presents its case you can't get mad at the jury for making a ruling or a judgment based on what they've heard. Nobody was there to plant any reasonable doubt. None of my witnesses had been contacted and my family wasn't even interviewed." There are two people - whose names Carty will not reveal - who can, she says, provide the alibi she so desperately needed at her original trial.
Her original state-appointed attorney, Jerry Guerinot, has 21 former clients on death row - more than any other lawyer in the entire country. The state prosecutors who sought her conviction were the same lawyers she had been working alongsideat the DEA for the past 20 years.
When the death sentence was imposed, Carty says it was like a sharp pain running through her body. "I felt an awful sense of loss, betrayed by a government I had worked for for 20 years. I put my life on the line for them and I couldn't understand why this was happening to me. I remember being driven in the van straight to the Mountain View facility here in Gatesville.
"The further we drove away from that courtroom, the more distant I felt inside, like I would be forgotten. I was scared - suddenly I was on the other side of the sphere - but I never lost hope. I was assigned to a single cell: inside was a bed, commode, sink, table and a stool. I was now officially a ward of the state. I sat in there and went through everything I'd done in my life, asking why I was there, why me. Then the tears started to fall."
The Texas department of criminal justice has to record the citizenship of every new inmate. When it was discovered that Carty was a British citizen, Stafford Smith took on her case and informed the British consulate.
"I knew sooner or later that having aggressive attorneys on my case would unearth the truth," she says, "and the British government has taken a pivotal role in pursuing justice for me."
Carty describes herself as a very religious person, but she believes that if somebody has committed a crime they should be held responsible. She doesn't, however, agree with the death penalty. "I think that here in Texas it is a machine where prosecutors can boost their egos and their careers. They will use anything at their disposal to get you here and that is a travesty that needs to be corrected. There are too many innocent people on death row and nobody gives them a chance and nobody cares."
When I ask how she is treated inside, Carty looks over at the prison warden, smiles, and says, 'Fine.' However, a German-based internet site that Carty has written for tells a different story. After complaining to the warden about non-delivery of her mail, Carty wrote: "One morning, an officer came to my cell after my shower and slammed the steel gate directly into my back, physically hurting my body. When I yelped from the excruciating pain ... I asked why she had hit me. She replied, 'Well I say you hit me first and I am wearing the grey, you're in white, and I don't see anyone else that will go against an officer.' When I looked in the mirror there was a large, ugly, red and bluish welt on my shoulder blade. I am tired of the abuses and targeted punishment.
"I'm not really afraid of dying," Carty says now. "I'm just pissed off that somebody decided I was guilty when I am not. Evidence was concealed and manufactured to put me here. And the only two people that could have cleared me were not contacted."
Carty's daughter Jovelle, who is studying political science at the University of Houston, tries to visit her mother every week along with her grandmother, Carty's mother. "I am in a cell on my own for 23 hours a day," she says. "We get one hour's recreation and the option to have a shower. I read a lot, mostly romance novels, but I'm more focused on trying to get home.
"They expect you to sit in here and not get emotional but this is a state that terminates your life, and mine was terminated on speculation. It is not something you can ever really adjust to."
