Linda Carty’s amen corner is back in the UK

Last week, TV presenter Phillip Schofield came under fire for taking a list of accused paedophiles off the Internet and handing it to the Prime Minister on live TV. We all use the Internet – otherwise you wouldn’t be reading this – but while Google and friends are truly wonderful in the ways they enrich our lives, the downside is that in order to get to the good stuff we have at times to wade through all manner of cyber-trash that rains down on us from clowns, idiots, hatemongers, and just plain liars.

Sadly, some of the most persistent such liars are murderers and those who advocate for them. Since 2009, the case of Linda Anita Carty has been peddled to the British public as a miscarriage of justice. Last week, she was given yet more air time to plead her innocence, not by the BBC this time, but by Phillip Schofield and his crew on the This Morning programme.

The offending item can currently be found here * for UK viewers, but it won’t be forever.

The truly amazing feature of this case is the way so many women have flocked to the cause of this miserable creature who masterminded the abduction of a young mother with the intent of cutting open her stomach and stealing her baby, an act as repulsive and bizarre as it is insane, and though necessitating one murder would probably have resulted in two.

By the time Carty had recruited her gang of miscreants to carry out the dreadful deed, Joana Rodriguez had given birth to her baby son, but Carty murdered Rodriguez anyway, standing over the young mother as she snuffed out her life in the trunk of a car by smothering her with a plastic bag.

Joana Rodriguez.

This Morning actually sent Gloria Hunniford to Texas to visit Carty on death row. This visit was filmed, and incredibly, Hunniford empathised with Carty as a grandmother. She would have done better to empathise with the parents of Joana Rodriguez. In 2004, her only daughter Caron Keating died from cancer aged just 41, sixteen years older than Rodriguez.

Back in the UK, Carty’s daughter Jovelle and her new lawyer spoke to Schofield.

Jovelle gave the spiel about Carty’s work with the Drug Enforcement Administration, but neither she nor Carty’s new mouthpiece Jay Alexander said how she came to be recruited as a snitch, nor about what happened afterwards.

Jerry Guerinot was cast as the villain of the piece, Alexander parroting Carty’s claim that he met with his client for only 15 minutes before her trial, a claim refuted emphatically by Guerinot himself, by co-counsel the former Windi Akins, and not least by the court record.

According to Alexander, Guerinot should have contacted the Prime Minister of St Kitts who had known Carty personally and would have testified on her behalf. Had he done so, he would have been a character witness at the penalty phase of the trial, not a witness to fact, but as the relevant judgment says at page 42a “...most, although not all, Carty’s supporters on St. Kitts had little contact with Carty in the two decades since she left there—as the district court noted...[but] their proffered testimonies of her good character appear ‘weak and stale’ when compared to the person she had become—a person who stole cars; organized drug deals, burglaries, and kidnappings; and committed murder.”

Alexander says Carty has never had a real trial and implies she has never told her story. She had the chance to do so at her trial – her real trial – she was advised not to testify, and took that advice. She was so advised because she would have been a vulnerable witness, which in this case means her lies would have been exposed in cross-examination.

Carty’s best chance of any sort of acquittal would have been to plead not guilty by reason of insanity or something of that nature, because the crime she planned – as opposed to the one she actually committed – was insane in anyone’s lexicon. Her lawyers had her assessed not once but twice by a psychologist, who found her sane.

Carty has been attempting to develop her evidence over the past few years, but like that other lost cause Mumia Abu-Jamal, she will never be allowed to relate these freshly concocted lies in the courtroom, although unlike Mumia she will almost certainly at some point in the not too distant future be dragged weeping from her toilet sized box on death row, strapped to a gurney, and injected with a lethal cocktail.

Why should the world care, indeed why does the world even notice?

Somebody one said that if Lee Harvey Oswald had shot his brother-in-law in the back of his car instead of the President of the United States he would have been arrested, charged, convicted, sentenced and forgotten in short order.

Unlike Oswald, Carty did not murder a President, nor is she a man of mystery; the clue is that if she had been a man, no one would have noticed or bothered. What sort of case can be made out for a man who kidnaps a young woman, steals her baby, and then murders her?

Purely on account of her age, Carty has little in the way of feminine wiles, but she has a tentative connection to the UK, which allowed Clive Stafford Smith (the Baron Münchhausen of Death Row) to sell her to the British public. She can also be seen as a cuddly, butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-her-mouth grandmother, but the illusion is deceptive. A small child may call a Bengal tiger a pussycat, but anyone who has ever seen one in the flesh, a ferocious beast with a head the size of a man’s outstretched arms, may beg to differ. Tigers are natural born killers, so is Linda Carty, which is why she is kept in a cage, one from which she will be freed only by death, one way or another.

[The above article was first published November 13, 2012. * This article was originally linked to the episode of the This Morning programme in question. When I was working on this page, July 30, 2021, I found only a broken link, so I have replaced it with a link to a new on-line resource called Alchetron. The page in question was a pleasant surprise because it includes one of my videos about Carty!]

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