Release or retry death-row Richey, orders US court

Richey, 40, was told on Friday that an earlier appeal court decision to quash his conviction cannot be set aside. The ruling means that, after almost two decades on death row, Richey must be retried within 90 days of May 25 or released from jail.

Prosecutors in Ohio, where Richey was convicted of a child murder in 1986, had wanted the appeal to be reheard but this was refused by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati. Over the years, law officers in Ohio have blocked every legal move to have Richey freed.

Despite the insistence by US prosecutors that Richey is a murderer, serious questions about the verdict have been raised. The case is thought to be so unsafe that human rights group Amnesty International described it as ?one of the most compelling cases of apparent innocence that human rights campaigners have ever seen?.

The only option now open to prosecutors is to ask the Supreme Court ? the highest court in the US ? to intervene.

Last night, news of the court decision was greeted with cautious optimism by his fiancée Karen Torley and campaigners.

Torley said she hoped Richey would be home by late August.

She said: ?I think we are at the end of the home run. 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 [Jim Petro], as he?s running for governor and he doesn?t want to see anyone being let off death row.?

Torley said she was drained by her fight to free Richey, who at one point had his head shaved and was an hour away from execution. At other times, it has appeared the Scot was just days from release.

?It?s happened so often that sometimes even Kenny doesn?t know what stage it?s at.?

Richey, who lived in Edinburgh until 1982, was sentenced to death after he was convicted of killing two-year-old Cynthia Collins in an arson attack.

On June 29, 1986, he was at a party celebrating a planned return to Scotland to start work as a nightclub doorman. Early the next morning a fire broke out in a nearby apartment block. The toddler, trapped in her bedroom, died of smoke inhalation.

Richey was arrested and convicted of using petrol and paint thinner to start the fire. He was accused of starting the blaze out of jealousy in an attempt to kill a former girlfriend, who was asleep with her new boyfriend in the apartment below.

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

Since his conviction in 1987, two witnesses who had claimed Richey previously threatened to burn down the apartment have retracted their statements. Richey?s new lawyers have also gathered evidence to show the fire was not started with petrol or accelerants. Tests have shown traces of inflammable substances on Collins?s carpet were only gathered after it had lain for almost two weeks in a shed in a police station and rolled out in front of petrol pumps.

Politicians at Holyrood and at Westminster, including foreign secretary Jack Straw, have tried to intervene to have Richey freed. The controversial case has also won support from the European Parliament, a host of celebrities and the late Pope John Paul II.

Rosemary Burnett, the director of Amnesty International in Scotland, called for Ohio to stop using the Richey case as a ?political football?.

She added: ? The state of Ohio needs to give it up. This case has become mixed up with political campaigns, so many of the law officers don?t want to appear to be condoning crime. They want to appear to be hard men.?

15 May 2005 Sunfay Herald UK

By Liam McDougall, Home Affairs Editor