Click here to download the full Court of Appeals document re Linda Carty
Click here for a photograph of Joana Rodriguez before she met Linda Carty
Click here for a photograph of Joana Rodriguez after she met Linda Carty
Since my first article about Linda Carty was published, on Majority Rights, March 7 this year, I have done a considerable amount of research on this case. At that time and for most of the time afterwards I relied principally on two quite lengthy official documents published by the United States Court Of Appeals.
Click here for a photograph of Joana Rodriguez after she met Linda Carty
Since my first article about Linda Carty was published, on Majority Rights, March 7 this year, I have done a considerable amount of research on this case. At that time and for most of the time afterwards I relied principally on two quite lengthy official documents published by the United States Court Of Appeals.
Recently, within the past week, I found another document - the one you are hopefully about to read - which is not so much a lengthy judgment as an unpublished book. Running to 234 pages, this document includes all the court material I had read previously, and a great deal more besides.
Not only does this document prove Carty's guilt beyond a shadow of a doubt but it exposes her most vocal supporters - the Reprieve organisation - as damned liars. Let me make this clear. Carty has both the right to protest her innocence and to plead for her life. Ted Bundy had that right too, and he was convicted of even more heinous crimes than Carty, and on evidence that was just as compelling. Reprieve also have the right to plead for Carty's life, but what they do not have the right to do is wilfully mislead the public, especially when they are openly soliciting donations from it. They have also slandered Carty's lawyer, as will become evident to anyone who reads the relevant passages.
Everything, or almost everything Reprieve claim about this case is a tissue of lies, distortions or claims that either cannot be verified or are totally irrelevant. You will find a simplified version of their main Linda Carty page here or if you want it with pictures, etc, the original can be found here.
Here are a few points from their bleatings: "The perpetrators struck a deal with the prosecution to save their own lives by trying to shift the blame onto Linda."
What Reprieve don't tell you is that it was Carty and Carty alone who carried out the actual murder; she smothered Joana Rodriguez with a plastic bag - see page 7 of the document; that one of her co-conspirators, Christopher Robinson, tried - albeit belatedly - to save the victim, and that the same man probably saved the lives of the two men with whom Miss Rodriguez shared an apartment - her boyfriend/common law husband and his cousin - see page 6. Robinson may have been a criminal lowlife, he was after all prepared to force his way into the victim's apartment and subject both these two men to considerable violence, but whether out of humanity, or fear of retribution, he was not prepared to commit one murder, much less three.
Carty's co-accused were guilty of murder by virtue of joint enterprise. Clearly the State recognised this, and this was the reason the death sentence was sought only for her. It was not Carty who was framed by the men who invaded the apartment, rather it was they who were duped into committing a crime in which they had no interest - kidnapping - and who were also indicted for and convicted of murder due to Carty's cruel and unnecessary act.
Reprieve have blamed Carty's predicament on her lawyer as much as on her co-defendants; on their website they publish a cartoon that suggests Jerry Guerinot is probably the worst lawyer in the world. One of the bases for this claim is that he is said to have had more clients end up on Death Row than any other lawyer in the United States. This is a case of lies, damned lies and statistics. In the first place, Texas executes far more convicted murderers than any other state. In the second place Guerinot is - or was - a public defender who specialised in capital cases. Another way of looking at that statistic is that half the people he has defended on capital charges did not end up on Death Row. So perhaps he secured the acquittal of a guilty murderer or two? He's damned either way.
In fact, although Guerinot was facing an uphill struggle, he gave it his best shot, see page 85: "Petitioner [Carty] rented a hotel room because she had moved out of her apartment....Trial counsel successfully moved to suppress items the police later found while searching the hotel room, including many items used to take care of a baby."
We are not told why the court excluded this damning evidence, but the fact that it existed is a further pointer both to Carty's guilt and the truth about her supposedly so incompetent lawyer.
It is difficult to credit the claim made by Carty and echoed by Reprieve that Guerinot spent only fifteen minutes with his client prior to the trial, but if he spent less time with her than he should have, it was hardly his fault. At page 164 he says Carty "refused to speak to me or my co-counsel, Windi Akins, because she insisted she was hiring her own lawyer...[she] was the most uncooperative defendant I have ever represented in a capital murder case...[she] told us about the circumstances surrounding her stay at the Hampton Inn Hotel and the items found in her room. Based on that information, we filed a motion to suppress evidence that was recovered in her hotel room, and we were successful in that motion...[she] continued to state that she was hiring other attorneys and again stopped communication with us during the trial."
So, according to both Guerinot and the court, he was able to effectively suppress some of the evidence against Carty. And it is a matter of record that Carty was warned by the court that she should cooperate with him - see page 162.
Even the claim that Guerinot was guilty of "Failure to inform Linda, a British citizen, of her right to consular assistance" turns out to be total bunk because at page 150 we are told the day after her arrest, Carty was given a form that allowed her to declare her foreign citizenship. She did not avail herself of it, and in fact declared herself to be a US citizen. Having lived in the United States for twenty years, she might well have. According to the court, at page 151: "Petitioner chose to lie about her citizenship." and "In a competency evaluation...on June 27, 2001, Petitioner stated that she was born in the United States Virgin Islands."
Clearly, she wants to have her cake and eat it. This post-conviction plea for intervention by the British Government is simply the case of a drowning woman clutching at straws; anything to attempt to save her skin, but even if she had applied for and received consular assistance, this was a murder case with no political angles to it, and a ton of evidence against her. What could the British Government or any government have done for her?
The other claims made by Carty and Reprieve, including against her lawyer, similarly have no basis in fact. How about this porker?
"During the 80s, Linda worked as a hair stylist, and the chatter of women associated with local drug dealing led Linda to work as a confidential informant for the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Linda has always asserted her innocence of the murder charges, and believes that she was framed because of her work with the DEA."
No, that is not how she became a DEA snitch at all - see pages 9-10 and 97.
And for the evidence that Carty was framed, the reader is referred to the letter written by Sarah Hernandez at the behest of Carty herself - see page 95. Framed indeed!
Regarding mitigation, Carty's daughter Jovelle, and her mother, and her sister Isalyn, all testified for her. Jovelle's evidence can't have been helpful, to put it mildly. She said she thought her mother had been pregnant and miscarried while living with Jose Corona, but Carty never told her own mother, Enid, that she had been pregnant - page 167. In fact this pregnancy, like the other pregnancies, existed only in Linda Carty's imagination.
There is no mention of the woman whose information led to Carty's arrest - see pages 7-8 and 74-5. Florencia Meyers was a neighbour of both Carty and the victim. She had no connection with the kidnapping, and was the classic disinterested witness.
There is no mention of the forensic evidence that damns Carty, in particular the cell phone records - page 9.
No mention of the other disinterested witness, Sherry Bancroft - pages 79 & 80 - whom she told she was in labour and was going to have a baby, a boy, that very afternoon. The reader is referred also to pages 4 & 86, where Carty is said to have told this same disinterested witness that she had actually had the baby - testimony that is utterly damning.
Reprieve continually portray Carty as not just a victim but the victim of this case. They claim - echoing her claim - that she was raped in 1988. For the probable truth about this claim, see my correspondence with Houston Police.
They claim she was in an abusive relationship, even that she was a battered woman. Presumably this refers to Jose Corona, the only man with whom she appears to have lived during her time in the United States. If this is so, then it begs the question, why was she so keen to renew their relationship? Corona left her shortly before she committed this dreadful crime. He left her, not vice versa.
Carty also told her fellow conspirators that the Rodriguez baby had been sired by Corona, a claim which is just about as ridiculous as all her other nonsense.
If Carty's lawyer did fail her - and I'm not saying he did - but if he did, it was by failing to inform her of her best trial strategy. In the words of Josie Anderson, who was originally a party to the conspiracy but backed out: "...man, this bitch is crazy" - see page 82.
People can do crazy things without being crazy, they may be just plain evil, but I know if I'd been sitting on this jury and heard compelling testimony about Carty's obsession and what it led to, I would have been inclined to believe she was anything but sane. It remains to be seen if Carty would have agreed to plead not guilty by reason of insanity, or if a jury of twelve reasonably intelligent men and women would have been persuaded that such mental impairment should have spared her from execution. But there is no indication anywhere that Carty would have agreed to such a suggestion; against the weight of enormous and compelling evidence she protested her innocence and continues to do so. And again, she can't have her cake and eat it.
The enduring enigma of this case is why Reprieve or anyone would wish to champion Carty in the first place, much less repeat such easily refutable lies on her behalf. But Reprieve are far from the only ones.
At the beginning of May, the Supreme Court of the United States declined to further consider Carty's case. On May 17, the New York Times ran a piece in which it blamed Jerrry Guerinot for her conviction, parroting Carty's and Reprieve's line. This article - A Lawyer Known Best For Losing Capital Cases - was written by time serving journalist Adam Liptak: a law graduate, Pullitzer Prize finalist and the paper's Supreme Court correspondent. One would assume that such an impressive CV would give him a modicum of critical faculty. Such assumptions appear to be totally unwarranted. The New York Times did not publish nor reply to my letter. So much for the benefits of a Harvard education and the integrity of one of the world's most prestigious newspapers.
Could this unwarranted support be because Carty is black? Hardly. There are many blacks on Death Row, a few of them may arguably be innocent or perhaps should not have been convicted of capital murder. Some of them have sad stories to tell, and probably most of them are more deserving of mercy than Carty, who by her own admission came from a fairly privileged background - that is assuming we can believe anything she says.
Is it then because she is a woman? A cuddly, butter-wouldn't-melt-in-her-mouth grandmother? Most likely. Although female homicide is by no means uncommon, the overwhelming majority of such killings are either domestic or have some strong mitigating factor - crime of passion, mental illness, and so on. Cold-blooded women killers are exceedingly rare, which is probably why there is such a fascination with them, and in this context we can mention Rose West, Aileen Wuornos, and of course Moors Murderess Myra Hindley. Although Carty isn't in that league, she was prepared to murder three innocent people, and but for Christopher Robinson, she surely would have.
Clive Stafford Smith made a video about this case in which he made a Mother's Day appeal for Carty; grinning like a Cheshire Cat with Down's Syndrome he told the world that when selecting juries in the United States he would attempt to stack them with women, mothers in particular, because mothers understand what it means to put someone to death. He may be right about that, and it is certainly true that a surprising number of gullible young women of child-bearing age - not all of them blondes - have jumped on the Reprieve bandwagon. But what Stafford Smith seems to have forgotten is that mothers also give birth. Alleged child killers often have to run the gauntlet on their way to court. In this country, the Moors Murderers, Thompson and Venables (who were only ten years old), and Ian Huntley to name but three cases were confronted by angry mobs during their appearances at the magistrates'. Huntley's co-defendant Maxine Carr, who was totally innocent of the Soham murders and whose only crime was (stupidly in retrospect) to give her lover an alibi, remains one of the most vilified women in Britain today, so much so that when she was released from prison she had to be provided with a new identity. Many of those who jeered Brady and Hindley, and who have actually physically attacked women who have been misidentified as Maxine Carr have themselves been women.
Carty's braindead liberal supporters accepted, what female juror would sympathise much less empathise with a creature like Carty who smothered a young woman in the trunk of a car with a plastic bag leaving a four day old baby without its mother?
One final point I would like to make; I have suffered a great deal of abuse and a certain amount of harassment for daring to speak the truth about St Linda of Kitts. One young lady accused me of being a misogynist; when I asked her on what grounds she made this sweeping charge, she replied:
1. You call a woman a 'bitch'
2. You don't seem to realise that a) most rapes are never reported, b) most rapes that are reported are never prosecuted, c) plenty of intelligent university-going women get raped, and of those, plenty don't report it.
3. You are arguing that a woman should be killed.
And you haven't exposed a single 'lie' - you weren't there, you don't know what happened. What you have said amounts to no more than hateful prejudice and the repetition of some false allegations.
You have some seriously bad energy. I think you may have a personality disorder. You need help.
******************************
A brief response is warranted:
1. I called a convicted murderess a bitch. Doubtless the family of the victim and the people she duped into carrying out this crime have called her a great deal worse. Josie Anderson, herself a woman, alluded to Carty as a crazy bitch - see above.
2. Who says most rapes aren't reported? How does she know? It is a sad fact that in addition to men raping women, women not infrequently cry rape. But this is not about most rapes, this is about one alleged rape in particular. Carty did not report being raped in 1988, and in view of her proven fantasising about her being pregnant and about Jose Corona siring a son by her victim, it is only prudent that we dismiss this claim as a fabrication.
3. I am not arguing that a woman be killed. That argument was made out by the State of Texas; the decision was taken by a jury, which appears to have included women. If it hadn't, we would have heard so.
As to my not exposing a single lie, is this broad dumb, or is she dumb? No, I wasn't there. I wasn't at the Battle of Hastings either - although I was at the replay in 1966!
As to my having a personality disorder, I am not the one who can't tell fact from fiction. And if misogyny is defined as calling a woman a bitch, what does smothering a young mother with a plastic bag amount to?
I rest my case.
Author: Alexander Baron.
Sydenham,
London
August 30, 2010
