by Bill Wallace
On 24 August and 9 September 2005, stays of execution were turned down and on 12 September the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles voted unanimously not to recommend that Newton’s sentence be commuted to one of life imprisonment. Further appeals were raised that claimed that she was not connected to the murder weapon but they were all declined.
Forty-year-old Frances Newton was strapped to the gurney to receive her lethal injection on 14 September 2005, still insisting that she was innocent of the murders of her husband and two children. With her parents watching, when asked if she wanted to make any final comment she simply said, ‘no’. She turned her head briefly to look at her family as the drugs began to course through her veins and seemed to be trying to say something to her parents but the drugs began to take effect and she coughed and gasped as her eyes closed. Eight minutes later, at 6.17 p.m., she was pronounced dead.
Linda Carty
Harris County in Texas holds the unenviable record of having executed more convicted murderers than any state in the United States apart from Virginia. It contains the city of Houston which has 1.3 per cent of the population of the United States but carries out 10 per cent of the country’s death sentences.
British citizen, Linda Carty was tried in Harris County for ordering the killing of a neighbour, for the astonishing reason that she allegedly wanted to steal her baby. Almost inevitably, she was sentenced to death and now sits in Mountain View Prison – the state of Texas’s death row for women – watching the clock tick down to the time of her execution by lethal injection, as her appeals fall by the wayside.
It was not always like that for Linda Carty. She was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts, then a British colony and lived there until she was twenty-three-years old. She worked as a primary school teacher, taught at a Sunday School and was the leader of a volunteer socialwork group. She is remembered as passionate and committed. Her family was acquainted with Kennedy Simmons, the St Kitts Prime Minister at the time, and she was an activist on behalf of his party, the People’s Action Movement.
In 1982, Linda Carty emigrated with her family and her two-year-old daughter, Jovelle to the United States. She found a job as a pharmaceutical technician but by the end of the 1980s she had found a second, far more lucrative job. She became an informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). At the time, she was dating a Jamaican who, unknown to her was a drug-dealer the DEA were after. She was approached by a Houston police officer who introduced her to Charlie Mathis, a DEA agent who worked in the recruitment and management of confidential informants, known as CIs. Carty was checked out and became part of his unit, with a codename and a new telephone number. Her job was to befriend suspected drug traffickers. It would sometimes involve buying drugs from them to make sure what they were telling her was correct and was dangerous work. The people she was after were usually Caribbean but they were also sometimes from Colombia, at the time the drug capital of South America.
Incredibly, none of this came out in court and it seems almost certain that if it had, she would never have received a death sentence. Charlie Mathis did give evidence at her trial, but for the prosecution. He testified that at the time of the murder with which Carty was sentenced, she was no longer on the DEA’s books.
The facts of the case for which Linda Carty languishes on death row are simple. On 16 May 2001, three men burst into the apartment of twenty-five-year-old Joana Rodriguez in Houston, demanding drugs. They beat up a couple of men who were there – Rodriguez’ partner Raymundo Cabrera and his cousin Rigoberto Cardenas – and Rodriguez and her three-day-old baby were abducted and thrown into the boot of a car. The baby was later found unharmed but Joana Rodriguez was found asphyxiated, in a second-hand car that had been rented by Linda Carty. She had been tied up and a plastic bag had been taped over her head.
It was never suggested that Linda Carty played an active role in the killing or had even been at Rodriguez’ apartment but it was suggested that she had ordered that Rodriguez be killed so that she could kidnap her baby and pass her off as her own. Carty had suffered several miscarriages and believes that this theory originated from a woman who took her to hospital after one of them.
Her trial was a travesty. The three men who had carried out the attack and the abductions turned State’s Evidence and pleaded against Carty in exchange for immunity from the death sentence. It is suggested that the story of Carty wanting Joana Rodriguez’ baby was fabricated by them on the orders of someone for whom Carty had caused trouble for during her time as a DEA informant. It was horrific revenge.
Her court-appointed attorney Jerry Guerinot was next to useless. He has succeeded in getting life for his clients instead of the death penalty only five times since 1983, while no fewer than twenty of the capital clients he has had have been sentenced to death. Linda Carty described him in an interview with a British newspaper as ‘an undertaker for the state of Texas.’
Guerinot failed to present the good aspects of Linda Carty’s life. Her time on St Kitts would have demonstrated to the jury the kind of person she is. He is reported to have applied to the court for funds to travel to St Kitts but neither he nor any of his staff made the trip. He took nothing to do with her British connections, did not contact the British consulate who knew nothing about Linda Carty until after she had been sentenced to death. He failed to talk to DEA agent Charlie Mathis to understand the extent to which he used Linda Carty as an undercover agent and he certainly did not use this important element of her defence properly. He never spoke to Carty’s common-law husband, Jose Corona, but the prosecution did. They called him to testify that Carty had suffered three miscarriages, the third shortly before the murder. It made it seem that she had become desperate as the result of her last miscarriage. Incredibly, Guerinot failed to inform Corona that in Texas spousal privilege means that husbands and partners are not obliged to testify against their partner. Had he done that and Corona had not testified, the motive for the killing might have been rendered doubtful. Guerinot admits that it was a mistake. Unfortunately, however, he realised too late.
Carty claims that Guerinot would never talk to her, never took her calls and hung up when he heard it was her on the line. For his part, he claims that he could not get her to talk to him. He says that she is ‘crazy’ and has ‘mental problems’ and describes her as ‘hedonistic and self-centred’. He has gone as far as to say that to get her to talk to him on one occasion he had to bribe her with a bar of chocolate. Carty laughs at what she describes as an outlandish assertion; she is, after all, severely allergic to chocolate.
Needless to say, she dispensed with the services of Jerry Guerinot and her case was taken over on a pro bono basis by Baker Botts, the firm of former US Secretary of State, James Baker. They launched an appeal on the basis that the attorney appointed by the judge at Carty’s trial, Guerinot, was ineffective, but the appeal failed.
Linda Carty has just about exhausted every stage of the appeals process. On 12 September, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected her appeal which means only the United States Supreme Court and the Governor of Texas stand between her and the execution chamber. A date for her execution is likely to be set for some time in 2010.
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