Please help save Linda Carty, a British Grandmother on death row in Texas.

 “Hi, I’m Linda” she says. “Hi, I’m Steve”. I tell her that her family, who I’d filmed the day before, all send their love. I’m trying to be casual and matter of fact. But I’m surrounded by prison guards and they are counting down my time there. I’m allowed 60 minutes.

I have a camera crew with me. My aim is to get Linda’s story out to the world. Her execution will take place later this year unless there is a worldwide campaign to save her. She will die by lethal injection in a horrific theatre of death watched by her beloved family. I believe she is the victim of one of the worst miscarriages of justice suffered by a British citizen in recent times.

I ask Linda to tell me her life story. My hope is that in the one hour we’ve got together she can help save herself by letting people know about her plight. She is articulate, charming and emotionally intelligent. How she has achieved this after suffering so much, I have no idea.

She tells me she was born in the Caribbean island of St. Kitts in 1959. She had a very happy childhood. She did well at school and in her late teens she became the village schoolteacher. She was very religious and she loved gospel songs. I ask her to sing something- and she sings Amazing Grace. She has a beautiful voice. I feel myself welling up.

She fell in love with the local policeman got pregnant and had a baby outside of marriage. The father soon left. But Linda loved being a mum and adored her beautiful daughter Jovelle. “To make a baby, it’s like your whole world”. When Linda was in her early twenties her whole family- a very big one- moved to Houston in Texas to live.

Linda enrolled at Houston University but she was brutally raped, became pregnant and gave the rapist’s baby up for adoption. This tragedy marked a turning point in her life. “I started to get into abusive relationships”, she says. To help save one boyfriend from prosecution Linda says “I was blackmailed”. She agreed to work for the police as an informer, helping to convict dangerous drug gangs. It was this secret work- which made her many powerful enemies- that she believes led to her downfall.

In 2001 Linda was convicted of a horrific crime of which she has always proclaimed her innocence. She was accused of conspiring to murder one of her neighbours to abduct her new born baby. Her trial however was utterly flawed. The main evidence against her was given by the convicted criminals who carried out the murder.

The flimsiest of evidence was allowed to stand because Jerry Guerniot, her defence lawyer –one of the worst in recent American history- failed to see her until two weeks before the trial. He was so disinterested in the case he failed to interrogate prosecution witnesses and to call to the stand those who would most certainly have saved Linda’s life. As Linda says, “he was a disaster for me”.

This is a travesty that can happen to defendants who are poor and black in Texas. They are the ones who end up on Death Row. But in Linda’s case the injustice was made worse by the fact that her British citizenship was never recognised by the Texan authorities. If it had, she would have been supported and saved by the British government and the British people.

But it is not too late to help Linda. Her last real chance of escaping the death sentence and getting the fair trial she deserves lies in the Supreme Court in Washington. With the help of Reprieve I am presenting a plea for clemency in Linda’s case on February 26th 2010 and the court makes a decision during the spring.

Please sign our petition to save Linda and tell your friends about her case.

This is her last chance. Linda is now fifty one and she has spent more than eight years in a condemned cell, sometimes shackled in a cage when visited by her family. What has kept her going is the dream of one day walking free and clearing her name. All she wants is to one day be reunited with her loved ones again- and to hug her two young grandchildren that she is not even allowed to see.