Britain Seeks to Halt Georgia Execution

British leaders are waging an unusually strong campaign to convince Georgia state officials to spare the life of a British citizen who is scheduled to be executed Tuesday for a 1985 murder.

The guilt of Tracy L. Housel--sentenced to death for killing Jeanne Drew, whom he met at a truck stop northeast of Atlanta--is not in question. The doubts are about his mental health at the time of the murder, as well as his legal defense.

The case “has haunted me for years,” confessed his former lawyer, Walter M. Britt.

Although Britain, like all other western European countries, has outlawed the death penalty, the Housel case marks the first time that government officials have weighed in on behalf of a British citizen on death row in the U.S.

British Foreign Minister Jack Straw has called Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes, the British ambassador has called the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles and more than 100 members of Parliament say they favor clemency for Housel, who is one of four British nationals on death row in the U.S.

Vera Baird, a member of Parliament and the Queens Council, plans to speak on Housel’s behalf today when the parole board holds a hearing on Housel’s clemency bid.

“I will be bringing a letter from the prime minister [Tony Blair] showing that he wishes the sentence to be commuted” to life without possibility of parole, Baird said over the weekend.

The five-member board has the sole power to commute a death sentence in Georgia.

The case has not generated much attention in this country, but it has been covered extensively in the British press. On Thursday, death penalty opponents demonstrated outside 10 Downing Street urging Blair to weigh in, as Mexican President Vicente Fox did on behalf of a Mexican national facing the death penalty last year in Oklahoma. That man’s sentence was commuted to life.

The British government’s support for Housel represents a new step in that country’s opposition to the death penalty, said Clive Stafford-Smith, a New Orleans-based attorney who specializes in death penalty appeals and is a British native.

In 1995, Stafford-Smith and others failed to persuade then-Prime Minister John Major to intervene on behalf of Nick Ingram, a convicted murderer who was executed in Georgia. Ingram, who like Housel had dual British and U.S. citizenship, is the only Briton who has been executed in the U.S. since the federal government reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

The initiative comes at a time of growing ferment against the death penalty in various parts of the world, particularly Western Europe; countries are not admitted into the European Union if they have the death penalty. Britain is one of 75 nations that has abolished capital punishment for all crimes; 109 countries around the world have either banned the death penalty or have ceased using it.

There are 118 foreign nationals from 33 countries on U.S. death rows.

A Hope for Compassion

“We are not asking anyone to forgive Tracy, just to show some compassion,” said Stafford-Smith, who also will speak to the pardon board today. “He would spend the rest of his life in prison if we succeed.”

Also protesting the pending execution are Amnesty International, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and Sister Helen Prejean, the noted death penalty foe. She also plans to speak on Housel’s behalf today.

But Gwinnett County prosecutors, who during a 1986 trial described Housel as a predator who “deserves no mercy,” firmly assert that he should die for his crimes.

Gwinnett County Dist. Atty. Danny Porter described Housel as a calculating killer. “He’s like Ted Bundy,” Porter said, referring to the Florida serial killer executed in 1989 for murdering eight women.

“He’s charming and smart. If you met him at a truck stop, you’d take him home to meet your sister and then he’d kill her,” he said.

Through his attorneys, Housel, now 43, has expressed remorse for murdering Drew.

His murder conviction and death sentence have been upheld by the Georgia Supreme Court twice, a federal district court in Atlanta and the federal appeals court there. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice declined to review the case, most recently in February.

Appellate attorneys Robert L. McGlasson and Mary Elizabeth Wells contend Housel should be given clemency because he had a serious mental defect at the time of the crime and received constitutionally deficient representation from a court-appointed lawyer who was trying his first capital murder case.

The attorney, Britt, decided that the case against Housel was strong and encouraged him to plead guilty. Such a plea is generally accompanied by a promise from prosecutors not to seek the death penalty, but not in this case.

Housel had been charged with murdering Drew, raping her, stealing her car and using her credit cards. Prosecutors dropped the rape charge in exchange for the guilty plea, a deal that yielded no benefit to Housel.

During the penalty phase, Britt mounted a skimpy presentation, calling only three witnesses and taking only 30 minutes, according to court documents.

Years after the trial, new lawyers were appointed to represent Housel and discovered he was abused as a child and suffers from severe hypoglycemia, a blood sugar imbalance that, if left untreated, can render a person psychotic, according to experts retained by the defense.

In the federal district court appeal, Dr. Buris Boshell, an endocrinology expert, testified that Housel “underwent an acute state of hypoglycemia, exacerbated by alcohol, at the time of the crime.”

“When in the throes of a hypoglycemic episode, as [Housel] was at the time of this crime, Mr. Housel did not have the mental capacity to distinguish between right and wrong,” he said.

The district attorney scoffed at the suggestion. “Most people who have hypoglycemia eat a candy bar; they don’t rape and murder,” Porter said.

Two other mental health experts who examined Housel for the hearing concluded that he “suffers from brain damage and severe psychological impairments,” according to a recent defense brief.

Housel, who was born in the British territory of Bermuda, spent a good deal of his youth living in poverty in Rhode Island. He was frequently beaten by his father and neglected by his mother, who married at age 14 and was an alcoholic, according to court testimony. Housel also suffered several head injuries that went untreated because his father did not believe in doctors, according to testimony.

But Britt did not learn any of this when representing Housel. In fact, both Housel and his mother testified during the trial’s penalty phase that he had a “normal” upbringing.

Britt acknowledged that he provided an inadequate defense.

“I have to live with the fact that I helped to put my client on death row. If I had known then what I know now, I would never have advised Mr. Housel to plead guilty,” Britt said.

He believes that if the evidence of Housel’s mental problems had been presented to the jury, his client would not have been convicted of capital murder. “Even if we did not prevail at trial, it would have provided the jury with a reason to spare Tracy’s life.”

But a federal trial judge and the federal appeals court have rejected arguments that Britt’s performance was constitutionally deficient. “A failure to investigate [the client’s background] is not a unique category of counsel omission that automatically satisfies” the Supreme Court test for ineffective counsel, the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last year.

Jury Heard Allegations

Once Britt was told that Housel’s upbringing was normal, the attorney could reasonably have decided to investigate no further, the appeals court said.

Housel’s backers also contend that his rights were violated during the trial’s penalty phase because prosecutors told jurors about other crimes Housel allegedly was involved in--including a murder in Texas and assaults in Iowa and New Jersey--even though he was not charged in those crimes.

Under Georgia law, prosecutors may present evidence of unadjudicated offenses during the penalty phase of a capital murder trial. Georgia and Texas have the loosest standards in the nation permitting such evidence during sentencing. In California, a jury is permitted to consider it only if the jury finds beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant committed that offense.

Last year, in a ruling stemming from a Texas case, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights concluded that it is a violation of human rights to introduce such evidence. That decision is not binding on any U.S. court.

Housel’s attorneys claim that the introduction of the unadjudicated offenses, which were a central component of the prosecution’s evidence in the penalty phase, violated the 8th Amendment’s bar against cruel and unusual punishment. But the 11th Circuit Court declined last year to consider the merits of this argument.