It was an unseasonably cold day in May 2002 when Charlie Mathis walked into the Houston courtroom. He had been called as a witness for the prosecution, which he found puzzling: He had, after all, spent the last few years working with the woman now sitting in the dock and felt sure she wasn’t physically capable of committing murder — the crime before the court. In fact, if anything, he had expected to appear for the defense, but Mathis says that as he walked past the woman’s lawyers, one of them turned to him and commented glibly: “Oh, I guess I should have talked to you sometime, shouldn’t I?”
It was an early sign that Linda Carty, the woman in the dock, had a difficult road ahead. A British passport holder from the Caribbean island of St Kitts, Carty is now 51 and has spent almost eight years on death row in Texas, accused of abducting and killing a woman in order to steal her baby and pass it off as her own.
In the early morning of May 16, 2001, four men broke into an apartment in the apartment complex where Carty lived, demanding drugs and money from the people inside. Joana Rodriguez, who lived there with her husband and infant son, was later found suffocated in the trunk of a car that belonged to Carty’s daughter, her arms and legs bound with duct tape, and a plastic bag placed over her head. Her baby was found alive in another car later the same day. Three of the men — Chris Robinson, Gerald Anderson and Carliss Williams (the fourth has never been identified) — told police that Carty had planned the entire thing and that she told them if they broke into the apartment and kidnapped Rodriguez and her son, they would find 91kg of marijuana and cash inside.
In return for testifying against Carty, the three men were each promised lesser sentences. During the police investigation, a tenant in the same complex told detectives she had seen Carty the previous evening sitting in a car in the parking lot and that she had told her she was pregnant and that the baby was going to be born the next day.
Carty blames her conviction on her trial lawyer, who she says was woefully inept. She also believes that she was framed by people she met in her work as an undercover informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a job that involved befriending criminals and passing on information to handlers such as Mathis. She says Robinson, Anderson and Williams must have been hired to carry out the task.
Last autumn, an appeal court rejected Carty’s claim that her trial in 2002 was unfair. This means that the Supreme Court, and a rare last-minute reprieve from the board of paroles and pardons, is all that stands between her and the ultimate punishment: execution by lethal injection. This could come later this year.
The British government seems to be rallying behind Carty. Last year it filed an amicus brief (a legal document registering the concerns of a third party over the court’s decision) at the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. On Feb. 26, the human rights group Reprieve announced at a press conference that the government is filing another brief — this time to the US Supreme Court. In addition, the solicitor general for England and Wales, Vera Baird, plans to fly to Texas to increase British involvement in the case. But time is fast running out.
Although the number of executions in the US has declined over the past five years, the percentage carried out by Texas has increased. Since the mid-’70s, Texas has been responsible for more than a third of all US executions; between 2002 and 2006 it was responsible for 40 percent and last year it accounted for 50 percent, including two foreign nationals.
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