Hopes Rise That Death Row Scot May Soon Be Home

Ohio prosecutors had wanted the appeal to be reheard but the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati refused.

The prosecutor?s only option now is to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.

Karen Torley, who is engaged to Richey, said she hoped he would be home by late August.

Richey was convicted of killing a girl, aged two, in a 1986 arson attack in Ohio but he always argued his innocence. Ms Torley said:

?I think we are at the end of the home run.

?The Sixth Circuit agreed today that the 90 days to retry or free Kenny should begin on May 25.

?This means the 90 day clock starts ticking from that date and I am cautiously hopeful that he should be released and back home by the end of August.

?I just hope they don?t start messing him about again.

?It?s a political year for the Attorney General as he?s running for governor and he doesn?t want to see anyone being let off death row.?

Ms Torley said she was drained by the ?stopping? and ?starting? of the 90 day clock. ?It?s happened so often that sometimes even Kenny doesn?t know what stage it ?s at,? she said.

British MPs and leading human rights campaigners have fought on behalf of Richey for years, pleading a ?compelling? case of innocence. The controversial case has also won support from the European Parliament, a host of celebrities and the late Pope John Paul II.

Richey, who grew up near Edinburgh Castle, went to Ohio in the 1980s to stay with his father. On the evening of June 29, 1986, he had been at a party, celebrating the fact that he was about to return home and take up a job as a nightclub doorman. He got drunk and stumbled off. Some time later a fire broke out at a nearby apartment block. Two-year-old Cynthia was trapped in her bedroom and died from smoke inhalation.

Richey was arrested and convicted of using petrol and paint thinner to start the fire. The court was told that Richey started the fire out of jealousy in an attempt to kill a former girlfriend, who was asleep with her new boyfriend in the apartment below the one that burned.

During the three-day trial, Richey twice rejected plea-bargain deals which would have spared his life if he had admitted starting the fire.

In 1997 two witnesses who had claimed that Richey previously threatened to burn down the apartment retracted their statements.

Recent forensic evidence cast doubt on whether the fire was started deliberately at all.