Witnesses Against Death Row Grandmother Admit they Lied Following Threats from Prosecutors
Monday, February 16, 2015 - 3:30pm
Witnesses Against Death Row Grandmother Admit they Lied Following Threats from Prosecutors
WASHINGTON - Key witnesses against a British grandmother on death row in Texas have said that prosecutors in her 2002 trial threatened or ‘blackmailed’ them into testifying against her.
Among them is the only person who claimed to have seen Linda Carty (56) carry out the murder of Joanna Rodriguez, who has now admitted that Texan District Attorneys (DAs) “threatened me and intimidated me” into identifying Ms Carty as the culprit. Christopher Robinson, who was the key to the prosecution case, admits that he never saw Ms Carty kill anyone and his testimony to this extent at trial was a lie.
Mr Robinson has signed an affidavit, filed in September 2014, in which he testifies that prosecutors “told me I had to testify at Linda’s trial to avoid the death penalty, and they made it clear what it was I had to say.” Mr Robinson adds that they “[told] me I would get the death penalty myself if Linda Carty did not get the death penalty.”
Several other witnesses at Ms Carty’s trial have also admitted they were “blackmailed” by Texan prosecutors, and lied or omitted evidence as a result.
More:
http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2015/02/16/witnesses-against-death-row-grandmother-admit-they-lied-following-threats
= new reply since forum marked as read
--imm
Last edited Tue Feb 17, 2015, 08:31 AM - Edit history (1)
from the first link below.......:
The new testimony – which was unearthed by lawyers at international legal non-profit Reprieve following years of work and investigation – is currently being considered by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA). Ms Carty’s lawyers are asking for an evidentiary hearing to air this newly discovered evidence and ultimately seek a new trial.
Commenting, Clare Algar, Executive Director of Reprieve said:
“If Linda is not granted a new hearing, she faces the death penalty based on lies extracted by prosecutors desperate to secure an execution at any cost. The behaviour of prosecutors in this case has been so appalling it takes the breath away. They have stooped to targeting the marriage of one witness with invented slurs, while using the threat of death to force another to produce the lies they needed for conviction. Linda’s last hope is that Texas recognises that she deserves a new – and this time fair – trial.”
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/DEA-agent-former-eyewitness-allege-prosecutorial-6080417.php#/0
https://alethonews.wordpress.com/tag/connie-spence/
from the second link:
Charles Mathis, a former Drugs Enforcement Agency (DEA) officer who was Ms Carty’s ‘handler’ during the time she worked as an informer for the Agency has stepped forward to reveal the lengths the prosecutors went to obtain the testimony they needed. Mr Mathis’ affidavit states that when he told the Texan DA that he “knew that Linda did not have it in her to kill anyone,” and so did not want to testify against her, the DA “threatened me with an invented affair that I was supposed to have had with Linda.”
“I felt that [Texas DA Connie] Spence was threatening and blackmailing me into testifying,” Mr Mathis concludes. “It struck me that Spence wanted a death sentence as a feather in her cap. She was far more interested in a death conviction that the truth.”
...or their insane judges ever go to jail.
- I'm sorry if you live there, but fuck Texas.
K&R
Witnesses Against a British Grandmother on Death Row Say Texas Prosecutors Blackmailed Them Into Testimony
By Jenna Corderoy
February 17, 2015 | 6:19 am
Key witnesses against a British grandmother on death row in Texas have claimed that prosecutors in her 2002 trial intimidated, threatened, and blackmailed them into testifying against her, raising serious questions about a conviction which has been long protested by campaigners and the UK government.
Linda Carty was convicted for the kidnap and murder of her 25-year-old neighbor Joana Rodriguez, who was abducted along with her four-day-old son by three men in May 2001. The baby was found alive, yet Rodriguez was found suffocated in the boot of a car. It was claimed during the trial that Carty had hired the gang of men to steal the child so that she could raise him as her own. According to the Houston Chronicle, the three men who abducted Rodriguez and her child all had criminal records, but only Carty was prosecuted for capital murder.
Carty, now 56, has been on death row ever since. The US Supreme Court refused her appeal in May 2010.
Carty has always maintained her innocence, and campaign groups, as well as the British government, have highlighted serious flaws in her trial. According to human rights organization Reprieve, Carty was forced to accept a court-appointed lawyer, Gerald Guerinot, whose poor professional reputation has been covered in detail by the New York Times and whose astonishing tally of clients given the death penalty has been described by the American Bar Association Journal as a "possible record" in modern times. The British government complained that they were not notified of Carty's case, and that there was "ineffective assistance of counsel." It raised the issue with the then governor of Texas, Rick Perry, during his visit to the UK in 2013.
Key witnesses against a British grandmother on death row in Texas have claimed that prosecutors in her 2002 trial intimidated, threatened, and blackmailed them into testifying against her, raising serious questions about a conviction which has been long protested by campaigners and the UK government.
More:
https://news.vice.com/article/witnesses-against-a-british-grandmother-on-death-row-say-texas-prosecutors-blackmailed-them-into-testimony
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Linda Carty
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From the Independent, years ago:
Hope for Carty as court debates death penalty
By Guy Adams in Gatesville , Texas
Monday 06 December 2010
The latest skirmish in America's ongoing debate over capital punishment will take place in a court in Houston this morning, where lawyers for an accused murderer called John Edward Green will argue that the system has become so unreliable as to be an affront to natural justice.
They are likely to cite the fact that since 1976, when the US restored capital punishment, 136 death row inmates have been exonerated, including at least 12 in Texas.
At least one man has already been wrongfully put to death by the Lone Star State: last month, DNA testing revealed that a single hair used to convict Claude Howard Jones, who was executed for murdering a shop assistant in 1999, came not from him – as the jury had originally been told – but from the victim.
The innocence of another executed man is meanwhile the subject of heated debate. Cameron Todd Willingham was executed in 2004 after being convicted of starting a fire that killed his three daughters. But forensic experts have recently claimed that he was innocent, and that prosecutors obscured crucial evidence during his trial.
An official inquiry into his case by the Texas Forensic Science Commission will report next month. Its members have already admitted that there were serious "flaws" in Willingham's treatment.
Linda Carty's treatment at the hands of the Texan legal system is also said to have been riddled with basic errors. Carty, who emigrated to the US in the early 1980s to attend university, has always claimed British citizenship due to being born and raised on the Caribbean island of St Kitts. Under the Vienna Convention, UK authorities should therefore have immediately been informed of her arrest in 2001.
More:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/hope-for-carty-as-court-debates-death-penalty-2152194.html
DEA agent, former eyewitness allege prosecutorial misconduct in Linda Carty murder case
DEA agent, witness say prosecutors forced their hands
By Lise Olsen |
February 13, 2015 | Updated: February 14, 2015 10:53pm
Linda Carty has lingered on Texas death row for more than a decade, convicted of plotting the murder of her neighbor, Joana Rodriguez, in order to steal Rodriguez's newborn baby in 2001.
Her previous appeals have all failed - despite international protests over the fact that her Harris County-appointed attorneys spent only two weeks preparing for her capital trial. Her conviction rested on the prosecution's theory that Carty, a former school teacher from the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, directed three men with criminal histories to storm the victims' apartment, steal $1,000 and carry out the mother and child's abduction at gunpoint.
Now she's gained support for a new appeal from two unlikely sources: the DEA agent for whom she was once a confidential informant and a star prosecution witness who has now recanted.
~ snip ~
Front-page case
Carty holds British citizenship, and her case has generated a documentary film, front-page news stories in London newspapers and appeals from celebrities, like Bianca Jagger. In an amicus brief, the British government has argued the court should order a hearing so that a Harris County judge can consider whether Carty's death sentence came only after prosecutors coerced key witnesses to testify.
Carty was the last death penalty trial for defense attorney Gerald Guerinot, who over the years saw 20 clients condemned to death row - a number described by the American Bar Association Journal as a "possible record" for any capital attorney in modern times.
More:
http://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/DEA-agent-former-eyewitness-allege-prosecutorial-6080417.php#/0
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