Blair set to plead for death row Scot

TONY Blair is poised to make an 11th-hour intervention to save the life of death row Scot Kenny Richey.

The Prime Minister has not ruled out a direct appeal to his friend and ally President George Bush if Richey’s last appeal against execution fails.

Richey, who was brought up in Edinburgh, has been on death row since his 1987 conviction for killing a toddler in an Ohio house fire. He denies responsibility and refused the offer of a life sentence in return for an admission of guilt.

Until now Britain’s hands have been tied because Richey, who was born in Holland to an American father, was not a UK citizen. That is to change after officials decided an obscure part of the Nationality Act meant he could take an oath of allegiance to the Queen.

He has already been granted a British passport, and once he has also sworn the oath he will be eligible for help from British diplomats and the government.

They can officially call for him to be spared the death penalty and also attempt to ensure he is treated humanely in prison.

Senior government sources told Scotland on Sunday an official representation would be made "as soon as [Richey’s] nationality question is resolved".

Foreign Secretary Jack Straw is expected to lead the lobbying, building on the transatlantic diplomatic ties strengthened during the Iraq crisis.

But Blair will also step in if Richey’s appeal fails and an execution is imminent. No date has yet been set for Richey’s lethal injection.

One source said: "Listen, the bottom line here is that we oppose the death penalty and we will make that clear in all cases involving Britons abroad. That is the starting point."

He said Blair "would certainly get involved if the execution was imminent" and suggested he could intervene earlier than that if the British government decided Richey deserved a review of his conviction.

Richey, 38, is expected to take the oath of loyalty from his prison cell in Ohio within the next three weeks.

A spokeswoman for the Foreign Office said."There was an amendment to the Nationality Act which allowed children born to British women before 1983 to apply for citizenship."

The British authorities, stung by criticism of their inaction from pressure groups and politicians, privately insist they have been itching to intercede since the case was brought to their attention.

Consular staff in the United States have been monitoring Richey’s latest appeal, to a federal court, and the British deputy consul general in Chicago attended the proceedings last week "to register our interest in the case".

A Foreign Office official pointed out that earlier this year and last year, two death row inmates with dual UK and US nationality were the subject of representations to the American authorities.

However, they are not promising examples. In February, Jackie Elliott was finally executed via lethal injection in Huntsville, Texas, for the murder of a young woman 17 years earlier. Governor Rick Perry had rejected pleas for clemency from Straw and more than 100 backbench MPs.

A year earlier, an intervention from Blair himself failed to save Tracy Housel, who suffered the same fate in Jackson State Prison, Georgia.

Housel had never actually lived in Britain but he had dual nationality because he was born to American parents in Bermuda and was thus able to benefit from representations from Britain’s most senior politicians.

Richey was convicted in 1987 of starting the fire which killed Cynthia Collins as a revenge attack on her mother and his ex-girlfriend, Hope Collins.

>She was sleeping with her new lover in a flat beneath Cynthia’s home. But many believe Richey is the victim of a miscarriage of justice. His lawyers say an arson examiner can back their case that the fire was not started deliberately.

No-one saw Richey start the fire, but several saw him trying to get inside the blazing building to rescue the child.

He was sentenced to death because the court decided he had disconnected the smoke detector in Cynthia’s mother’s flat. But witnesses saw Hope Collins disconnect it herself while cooking on the night of the fire.

Amnesty International has said Richey has the most compelling case of innocence of any prisoner on death row in the US.

His bid for a retrial has been backed by the Pope, former Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey, actors Susan Sarandon and Robbie Coltrane plus Lothians MSP Margo MacDonald, among others.

Judges are expected to take between three and five months to decide whether Richey should be executed, freed or face a retrial. A date for his execution has already been set 13 times in the past.

The leader of the Free Kenny Richey campaign, Glasgow woman Karen Torley, who said she could be described as his "girlfriend", said: "Now that finally, after all these years, he [will be] officially British, they have to do a bit more to help him. I saw him on television and he looks hellish. His health is not good.

"Maybe the British can go in and make sure he’s getting proper medical treatment. Apart from not getting outside, he has got hereditary high blood cholesterol and he’s had two heart attacks.

"But the British government cannot do anything within the legal process. They can only officially ask, if this all goes wrong, that they don’t kill him."

Asked about a role for the Prime Minister, Richey’s mother Eileen Richey, of Dalry, Edinburgh, said: "It doesn’t matter who’s doing it. I would appreciate any help to get my son back home because he’s in there for something he never did and it’s a lot of wasted years."

Eileen Richey has learned stoicism over years spent with one son on death row and another, Tom Richey, serving a 65-year sentence for shooting a woman dead during a robbery while high on LSD in Washington state.

"If they say no, it’s no. That’s all they have to say and that’s it. Finished. There’s nothing we can do about that," she said.

"Kenny knows he never did it and I know he didn’t do it. Don’t mention Americans to me. I’ve had it up to here with them. They never admit they are wrong."

Eileen Richey’s problem is that a Scots mother’s love for her son means little in Ohio, where prisoner number 194746 is just one of 202 inmates awaiting execution.

Most of the local population, of whom about 85% support the death penalty, believe him to be the man who killed Cynthia.

There is little sympathy towards efforts to save him from the death chamber, where he is due to die by lethal injection - a stance also held by most of the judiciary who are elected to office.

Ohio has built up a reputation for refusing to overturn original verdicts. Its appeal courts have one of the lowest case reversal rates in the country.

However, Richey only needs support from two of the three federal judges now considering his case.

Judges Martha Craig Daughtrey and Guy Cole were White House appointees during President Bill Clinton’s administration and have a track record that may favour him.