The Guardian

Time runs out for Briton on death row

Unprecedented appeal - and UK efforts - fail to win clemency

 Matthew Engel in Atlanta, Georgia

March 12, 2002

Tracy Housel, the Briton convicted of murder in Georgia 16 years ago, faces near-certain death tonight after he was denied clemency yesterday by the state paroles and pardons board.

An extraordinary and unprecedented alliance of relatives, lawyers, campaigners, British politicians and European diplomats trooped into the board offices in Atlanta in a final attempt to save Housel's life. They were armed with an indirect appeal from Tony Blair addressed to Vera Baird, the MP for Redcar. It did not impress the five-strong panel, who traditionally give no reasons for their decision. No voting figures were released.

The hearing was closed to the public and media but witnesses said the board members appeared to soften just once: when they were shown two christening gowns crocheted by Housel for his lawyer's twin babies.

 One of his two sons, 20-year-old Randall, came out wishing he had said more: "There are not many ways to explain how to love your father. I thought none of them was listening to what was being said."

 A board member, Dr Eugene Walker, heard the delegation of EU consular officials plead that execution was wrong, then said: "You know, you have strong sentiments against the death penalty. You've got to know we have strong sentiments for it and it's part of our law."

 Housel is due to die in the jail at Jackson, Georgia, at midnight UK time, when he will be strapped to a trolley and injected with three types of poison: put to sleep, as they say when animals are involved. He has been on death row for 16 years for murdering Jean Drew.

 On a Saturday night in 1985 Housel met Drew at a diner outside the small town of Lawrenceville. Several witnesses saw them drive off together in the early hours in Drew's silver Ford Mustang. Housel's ring was found next to her battered body. He was arrested in Florida six days later. There is no dispute that he killed her.

 Little hope

 "The honest truth is there's not a lot of hope now," said Clive Stafford Smith, one of Housel's legal team, after the decision. Pleas will be made to various courts today, including to the US supreme court, which is obliged at least to listen, based on the claim that he was improperly denied consular access at the trial. But Mr Stafford Smith admitted: "I don't know if it will get us very far."

 The British-born lawyer also represented Nicky Ingram, the last Briton to be executed in the US, who was electrocuted in Georgia seven years ago. Then the Major government did nothing. This time Jack Straw, the foreign secretary, has rung the state governor, Roy Barnes, and embassy officials have made representations at every level to say Britain is against executions whatever the circumstances.

 The lawyers say no British government has ever gone this far in trying to save one of its citizens. Privately, they believe that only one person could have saved Housel at this stage, but Tony Blair has not picked up the telephone. "Frankly, no one in Georgia has heard of Jack Straw," one lawyer said.

 Under Georgia law, the governor has no direct power to stop the execution but it is thought he could lean privately on the five-strong board (three of whom are under investigation themselves, two for allegations of corruption and one for sexual harassment). But southern governors with presidential ambitions do not habitually err on the side of stopping executions. A direct appeal to him from Mr Blair could be rebuffed by reference to his powerlessness: please do not ask for clemency as a refusal often offends.

 British sources believe Mr Blair would have done more had he been more certain of success. Instead, he wrote to Ms Baird: "Even at this late stage I very much hope that the representations we have made will result in Mr Housel's sentence being commuted."

 Housel's claim to British citizenship rests on the fact that his American parents were in the British territory of Bermuda when he was born. He left as a baby. This is less of a problem for the campaigners than the difficulty of representing him as a poster boy against capital punishment.

 His supporters contend that he was suffering from brain damage at the time, brought on mainly by maltreatment by his abusive father and by a severe case of hypoglycaemia, low blood sugar.

 "The solution to all Tracy's problems was a Mars bar," said Mr Stafford Smith. Instead, Housel took refuge in cocaine and whiskey.

 Walt Britt, the court-appointed lawyer at Housel's trial, admitted yesterday that he should have known this at the time. "It's often said doctors bury their mistakes and lawyers don't talk about theirs but I'm here to say I made mistakes. I was not properly trained. I was in over my head."

 The Mars bar theory might have helped Housel avoid the death penalty at the time and could certainly carry weight with a jury now when polls are showing - despite September 11 - that support for the death penalty is declining, as reports of the whimsicality of the system gather weight with the American public.

 Outside the building Sister Helen Prejean, the nun who inspired the film Dead Man Walking, made a final appeal for Housel's life ("Do we have to freeze-frame him for one terrible act and freeze-frame ourselves in the act of killing him?").

 But she also expressed optimism that her campaign against all capital punishment was gathering strength: "Ninety-nine people have had to be put off death row because they have been shown to be innocent. People have been shocked by the fallibility of the system, by its capriciousness."

 But there has been no sign that the majority of Georgians are rallying in favour of Housel. In Lawrenceville his name is almost completely forgotten and the little publicity that the case has had has done nothing to build sympathy. John Latty, the police chief of Gwinnett county, told the Atlanta Constitution-Journal at the weekend that Housel had told him the full extent of his crimes in 1986.

 "How many murders have you committed?" Latty asked him. "Just give me a number." "Seventeen," Housel allegedly replied. Mr Latty has now asked Housel to write down the names of all his victims, for his lawyers to give them to the police after his execution as his last opportunity to bring the bereaved families peace.

 This figure has been pushed up as high as 30 in speculation by the local district attorney, Danny Porter. It would be hard to blame that many murders on the absence of Mars bars.

 But these figures enrage Housel's lawyers. He did apparently confess to killing a lorry driver in Texas and an attempted murder in Iowa. The jury heard about these cases, but they were not tested in court: another example of Mr Britt's failings.

 Was he a manipulative serial killer, as Mr Latty and Mr Porter claim, or a victim of a terrible undiagnosed disease? Or is the real Tracy Housel the loving father who crochets christening gowns? His lawyers say he is now falling to pieces and has had about 20 hours' sleep in two weeks.

 As he faces the longest sleep of all and his supporters hope for a miracle, they might also hope that the next person whose case gets this much publicity will be someone who wins more sympathy from people who support the death penalty - as well as from those who oppose it on principle.