02 March 2010 :

Actors join death penalty protest for Linda Carty. Actors Colin Firth and Julie Christie have joined an impassioned plea to save the life of death row prisoner Linda Carty. Carty, 51, black, was born in St. Kitts when it was still a British colony and therefore holds British citizenship, although she has lived in the United States since the early 1980s. According to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on 05/16/2001 Carty and three co-defendants [Gerald Anderson, Chris Robinson, and Carlos Williams] invaded the home of Joana Rodriguez, 25. The victim and her three day old baby were kidnapped and two other victims were beaten, duct taped, and left in the residence. Rodriguez was hog-tied with duct tape, a bag was taped over her head, and she was placed in the trunk of a car. This victim died from suffocation. Anderson, Robinson, and Williams, the co-defendants in the kidnapping and murder, were given prison terms but none received the death penalty after testifying against Carty. She counts several high-profile celebrities among her supporters. The actors Firth and Christie joined authors Philip Pullman, Zadie Smith and Martina Cole in writing a letter to the Sunday Times. The letter, organised by anti-death penalty group Reprieve, which slams the 2002 trial of the 51-year-old grandmother as “catastrophically flawed”, says: “Now is the time to get very worried about Linda - and to support the government's Supreme Court appeal on her behalf. Linda would not be on death row if she had been able to afford a decent defence lawyer”. It continues: “The [British] government has told the Supreme Court that Texas's failure to notify it of her arrest prevented Linda from receiving desperately needed legal assistant from the British consulate - that would probably have saved her life”. Carty, who faces execution by lethal injection, has always proclaimed her innocence.