A judge has recommended that a British woman on death row in Texas should not be granted a new trial, dealing a blow to her hopes of avoiding execution.
David Garner made his decision on Thursday after listening to closing arguments on Monday at the end of a hearing in which Linda Carty’s defence team argued that she was denied due process at trial because prosecutors allowed false testimony, failed to disclose evidence and hid the existence of deals with witnesses.
Carty was sentenced to death in 2002 for orchestrating the kidnap and murder of her neighbour in Houston, Joana Rodriguez, who was found bound and asphyxiated in the trunk of a car the previous year. Prosecutors said that after several miscarriages, Carty was desperate for a child, wanted to steal Rodriguez’s newborn baby and recruited three men to carry out the plot. The baby survived.
The 57-year-old former teacher and ex-Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) informant, who is a British citizen because she was born on the Caribbean island of St Kitts when it was under UK rule, has insisted she is innocent.
But Garner, a visiting judge based in nearby Galveston County, recommended that her application be denied, finding that the evidence did not show that Texas knowingly used perjured testimony, failed to correct untrue testimony or presented misleading testimony at trial.
His assessment will be passed to the Texas court of criminal appeals, which will review it and decide whether to grant a new trial.
“The judge found that the State did not coerce any witnesses to provide false or misleading testimony,” Jeff McShan, a spokesman for the Harris County district attorney’s office, said in a statement. “The court of criminal appeals will review the case and make a final determination on Carty’s writ.”
Garner did determine that the state withheld or failed to disclose witness statements and information that could have helped Carty’s cause – known as Brady violations – but concluded it was unlikely that this would have made a difference to the jury’s decisions. He ruled that it is up to the appeals court to decide whether he can make a judgment on the significance of an alleged deal between the state and a witness.
Carty has lost multiple state and federal appeals, previously contending that her counsel was ineffective. Her trial lawyers spent only two weeks preparing; one, Jerry Guerinot, became infamous for his lack of success when representing capital murder clients.
She did not appear at this hearing, which centered on the alleged lengths that prosecutors in a county dubbed “America’s death penalty capital” went to in order to secure a death sentence for a high-profile and particularly egregious killing.
Connie Spence and Craig Goodhart, two trial prosecutors who still work for Harris County, were accused during the hearing in Houston of “gamesmanship” and a “pervasive ends justify the means attitude” by Michael Goldberg, one of Carty’s attorneys.
He claimed that prosecutors cherry-picked questionable evidence to fit their narrative and withheld information from Carty’s trial attorneys, resulting in a distorted picture that persuaded a jury to convict Carty of capital murder.
The judge was also told by Carty’s lawyers that prosecutors had destroyed documents and emails that might have helped her cause.
Charles Mathis, a former DEA agent, testified that Spence threatened to invent a story about him having had an affair with Carty in order to blackmail him into testifying against her.
Carty’s alleged accomplices avoided the death penalty. One, Chris Robinson, claimed in a 2014 affidavit that he was told to testify that he saw Carty put a bag over Rodriguez’s head, which he said was untrue.
“Spence and Goodhart had a version of events in their minds and they were alternating between coaching me and threatening me to get me to say their version,” he said.
Spence and Goodhart appeared at the hearing and denied misconduct, with Spence rejecting Mathis’s claim, the Houston Chronicle reported.
Judge Garner made it clear in his findings that he was not persuaded by Mathis’s testimony or Robinson’s affidavit.
Joshua Reiss, an assistant district attorney, conceded Monday that standards are now different regarding the ways prosecutors provide information to defence attorneys. “There are things that went on in the trial that today might honestly make us wince a little bit,” he said. “[But] that was the law [at the time].”
Goldberg disagreed. “The state’s basic theory was that they could hide what they wanted because that was the norm back in 2002, but the reality is the constitutional requirements have never changed,” he told the Guardian after the hearing. The judge concurred, writing that prosecutors at the time operated under a misunderstanding of the law, deciding whether to turn over certain evidence based on “gut instinct” and “judgment call”.
The scrutiny of Carty’s case and unusual decision to hold a hearing into the misconduct claims comes at a testing time for the death penalty even in Texas, which carries out the punishment more than any other US state.
Fifteen people have been executed in the US this year; six in Texas, which is the only state with executions scheduled in the remainder of 2016, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Though Texas has not endured the botched executions and difficulties sourcing lethal injection drugs that have paralysed the process in other states, it has not put anyone to death since 6 April – an unusually long gap caused by multiple stays granted by the appeals court, which seems to have become more willing in recent months to give inmates extended opportunities to push for the re-examination of their cases.
