Alex Hannaford takes a lengthy examination in the current issue of the Texas Observer, "Did Death Row Inmate Linda Carty Get a Fair Trial?" Here's the introduction:
Trafalgar Square, just a stone’s throw from the very center of the British capital, is an expanse of paved sidewalk, pretty fountains and, most notably, five statues. The central statue is of Admiral Lord Nelson, after whose infamous 1805 sea battle the square is named; King George IV stands in one corner; two historical army generals in the others. The 'fourth plinth', as it's known, remained empty for 150 years, but for the last decade or so it has been used to showcase a series of artworks. For one day in September 2009, though, it carried a cardboard cut-out of an African-American woman, while beneath it, a portable PA system broadcast her voice — calm, and with a slight Caribbean lilt — to passers-by.
“Hello Trafalgar Square,” she said. “My name is Linda Carty and I'm speaking to you from death row in Texas in the United States.”
Her name will mean little to most Texans: the arrests, charges and then sentences in the case were reported locally -- but briefly -- in the Houston Chronicle and a longer piece appeared in the same paper in 2010 following the Supreme Court's refusal to review Carty's case. But the British press had been on it for a long time. In fact, over the last eight years, thanks to news reports (in everything from broadsheets like the Independent and Guardian to tabloids like the Daily Mail and Express), magazine features, a prime time television documentary and a sustained campaign by a London-based human rights group, Carty has become something of a cause célèbre in the UK — and not just for those opposed to capital punishment. Many feel that, irrelevant of her guilt or innocence, Carty simply didn’t get a fair trial.
From the Trafalgar Square plinth, Carty’s disembodied voice continued: “I'm sorry I sound like a desperate woman but I am desperate. The British people may be my last hope. If they ask for my life to be spared, maybe Texas will listen.”
But why has a little-known inmate on Texas’s death row — one of 10 women and 311 men — got the British all a fluster?
Carty was born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts when it was still a British colony. As such, Carty holds British citizenship, and under the terms of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, when she was first arrested, the British consulate in Houston should have been informed. But it wasn’t.
Earlier coverage of Linday Carty's case begins at the link.
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