Anti-terror law used to fight Kenny appeal

Attorney General Jim Petro today filed the state?s motion to re-hear Kenny?s controversial case and said it was seeking an extra 14 days to prepare its challenge.

Kenny, who has been facing execution for 18 years, was told by appeal judges last month that he must be retried within 90 days or set free as he received incompetent counsel at trial.

The 40-year-old Scot, who was brought up in Edinburgh, has been on death row in Ohio since being convicted of killing two-year-old Cynthia Collins in an arson attack in 1986.

In his request for a rehearing, Mr Petro claimed the ruling by a three-judge panel which quashed Kenny?s conviction went against sections of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA).

The AEDPA law was passed by then President Bill Clinton in 1996 in response to the bombing of the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City which killed 168 people. President Clinton vowed the perpetrators would be hunted down and punished, so part of the law included a new standard of appeal for death penalty cases, making it far more difficult for anyone sentenced to death to successfully mount an appeal.

Speaking from her home in Cambuslang, South Lanarkshire, Kenny?s fiancee Karen 41, who has taken his surname, said:
"It is frustrating. We expected this as they [state prosecutors] are not going to go down without a fight.
"They have requested an extra 14 days as they don?t seem to know what they are doing. They have asked for a hearing but there is no guarantee they are going to get it."

Ms Richey spoke to her fiancé last night and said he was "frustrated because it means more waiting".
She added: "He said that was what he was expecting. But he is upbeat and realises these are just delaying tactics. Kenny will be home."

It is believed the AEDPA requires state courts to defer to earlier decisions made by federal courts, something Mr Petro believes did not happen.

When it was introduced in the US, campaigners said the AEDPA would result in a bloodbath for Death Row prisoners, with one commentator saying: "This federal law, in short, is a death warrant for most prisoners on Death Row throughout the US without regards to the constitutional violations that may have resulted in an innocent person being wrongfully convicted."

British MPs and leading human rights campaigners have fought on Kenny?s behalf for years, pleading a "compelling" case of innocence. His case has also won support from the European Parliament, a host of celebrities and even the Pope.

Ten years ago, Kenny came within an hour of going to the electric chair before being granted a stay of execution.

Kenny has faced lockdown conditions over the last few days after two fellow inmates tried to escape. He has been locked in his cell and restricted to one phone call a day after Richard Cooey and Maxwell White, both convicted killers, tried to escape by climbing a pile of snow in the exercise yard. It is the first time in nearly ten years prisoners at the Mansfield jail have tried to escape. White was caught trying to climb the first of two perimeter fences. Cooey was captured between the two fences.

(source: The Scotsman : http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=409&id=148592005&20050211170558)