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Sick Briton set for US execution David Rose in Atlanta Observer Sunday February 4, 2001 Behind the ramparts and razor wire of the Georgia Diagnostic Prison 40 miles south of Atlanta, a brain-damaged, mentally ill Briton waits on death row. A last and probably hopeless appeal to the US Supreme Court is all that stands between him and the electric chair. Tracy Housel, 42, was persuaded to plead guilty to murder by his lawyer,
Walt Brit. The jury that sentenced him to death in 1985 heard nothing
about his catastrophic childhood, when he sustained severe head injuries,
nor a rare medical condition which made him prone to blackouts and out-of-character
psychotic rages. It was also unaware that when Housel was being interrogated
by police, he was being held in inhumane conditions, and repeatedly assaulted
with an electric prod. Despite his long incarceration, it was only last week that the Foreign
Office confirmed Housel was born and remains a British national. In an
email to Clive Stafford-Smith, the New Orleans-based British lawyer, Mike
Tiney, a senior Consular Department official, said: 'We will be seeking
advice from the Consul-General in Atlanta as to whether representations
should be made at this time, and if so to whom.' The disclosure of Housel's plight and British nationality will add to
Foreign Secretary Robin Cook's difficulties in attempting to maintain
the 'special relationship' with the United States as he travels to Washington
this week to meet the new President, George W. Bush. Cook opposes the death penalty as passionately as Bush has espoused and
enacted it. In his six years as Governor of Texas, Bush was responsible
for 139 executions, far more than any governor in American history. Cook
is certain to come under heavy pressure from human rights groups to raise
the case of Housel at their meeting. Housel is British by virtue of his birth at the King Edward VII hospital
in Bermuda, where his parents were working and where he spent his infancy.
His mother, Lula, who came from a dirt-poor background in North Carolina,
was only 14 when she married Bill Housel, who was 43. Tracy was born the
following year. His childhood, spent in impoverished circumstances in North Carolina
and Columbia Heights, Rhode Island, a ruined former mill town, was marked
by serious illness and injury. He suffered constant headaches and fevers,
for which his father - who 'did not believe' in doctors - refused to seek
medical help. At the age of seven, he fell off a roof and was knocked
unconscious. Badly concussed, his pupils were dilated for several days.
Later he was concussed again when another child attacked him with a baseball
bat. Finally, at the age of 11, he sustained brain damage after losing
consciousness again in a car crash. Meanwhile, Bill and Lula became abusive alcoholics. Witnesses at Housel's
appeals described how Tracy would try to end their fist-fights, only to
find both parents turn their anger on him. After one such incident when
he was 14, he ran to the home of one of Lula's friends. When she called
his mother, Lula responded: 'If you've got him, you can fucking keep him.
Come get his shit.' He ended up staying for three months, and soon after
his return, left home for good. In the early 1980s, Housel moved to Iowa, where he formed a relationship
with a widow, Robin Banks. Most of the time he was relaxed and easy-going,
and acted as a loving father to her children. But he was also prone to
sudden mood swings, when he would fail to eat for days on end and drink
and take drugs. It was not until years after Housel's trial that his appeal lawyers,
Beth Wells and Robert McGlasson, had him examined by two mental health
experts and several leading neuro-physicians. They later testified that
he suffered from an extreme form of an endocrine disorder, hypoglycaemia,
which made him prone to periods when he would lose control of his actions
and became unable to distinguish right from wrong. They added that all
the available evidence suggested it was during such a psychotic episode
that he committed the crime for which he was sentenced to death. Aside from a single conviction for soliciting a prostitute, he had no
criminal record when in early 1985, following the break-up of his relationship,
he embarked on a violent two-week odyssey across the United States. Police
claimed he was responsible for a catalogue of heinous crimes during this
fortnight: a near-fatal knife assault on a man in Iowa; raping and cudgeling
a man to death in Texas; forcing a woman to perform oral sex in New Jersey;
and finally, the beating and fatal strangling of Jean Drew in Gwinnett
County, Georgia. Housel was eventually arrested for her murder in Florida, when he tried
to use her credit card to buy a cowboy outfit. He confessed to the killing,
saying they had consensual sex after he picked her up at an Atlanta truck-stop,
but he had then become enraged and perpetrated his murderous attack. This was the only crime with which he was charged. However, the jury,
which had to decide if he should live or die, heard details of these other
alleged offences, although his guilt had not been established. Earlier,
detectives had repeatedly interrogated him about them as he awaited trial
in the Gwinnett County jail. After seeking advice from the FBI, they decided
to hold these interviews at night. In the jail, he was held in solitary
confinement, denied showers and exercise for more than three months, and
'punished' with an electric stun gun, at least once - according to evidence
from his fellow prisoners - while standing in water, in order to intensify
the pain. Housel's trial lawyer, Walt Brit, was recently qualified, and had never
handled a murder case. In later appeal hearings, he admitted he made no
attempt to ascertain the facts of Housel's abusive background, nor his
medical state. In advising him to plead guilty, he had deprived him of a possible defence
of insanity; had he known the full facts, Brit said, he would never have
given such advice. There were two main grounds to Housel's appeal to the 11th Federal Circuit
Court: that he had been deprived of his constitutional right to effective
legal counsel; and that, by adducing evidence of crimes which were unproved,
the prosecution deprived him of a fair hearing over whether he should
get life or death, rendering his execution a cruel and unusual punishment.
On 18 January the three appeal judges, led by a keen advocate of the
death penalty, rejected all Housel's arguments. He should go to the electric
chair. Although Housel has a final recourse to the US Supreme Court, it
is extremely rare for this court to prevent an execution. As Cook may find himself telling Bush this week, the US Constitution,
which the Supreme Court interprets, does not embody the principles embodied
by Britain's Human Rights Act. Housel's lawyer, Robert McGlasson, said last night: 'Housel's case amounts
to a human rights abuse of serious proportions. He did not get a fair
trial. The British Government may well be his only hope.' |