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Twenty years previously, Carty had been recruited as a confidential informant by the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) in Houston. "Houston was being bombarded by Jamaican drug dealers at the time and the DEA needed someone of Caribbean background to work for them that no one would suspect," she explains. "A friend of mine at the Houston Police Department got me the job. It was interesting work and low-key for me but I had to take on the life of a drug dealer." At the same time she studied pharmacology at the University of Houston, and later worked part-time as a hairdresser.

Her work for the DEA helped land seizures of thousands of dollars' worth of narcotics and saw the imprisonment of scores of dealers. Stafford Smith believes that her work may have helped convict someone who Robinson, Anderson and Williams had been working for. "My lawyers believe these three men may have been drug 'burros' or mules," she says. "It was too difficult just to kill me, so they hatched this plot."

Carty claims her supervisor at the DEA was aware of the link with Robinson, Anderson and Williams, but that this was overlooked by Houston homicide detectives. Her former supervisor is now first on Stafford Smith's list of people to interview. "That," says Carty, "is their smoking gun."

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"I was devastated and started shouting, 'I'm not guilty - I wasn't even there', but at the same time part of me accepted it because I'm also a pragmatist. If you have ineffective counsel and the state presents its case you can't get mad at the jury for making a ruling or a judgment based on what they've heard. Nobody was there to plant any reasonable doubt. None of my witnesses had been contacted and my family wasn't even interviewed." There are two people - whose names Carty will not reveal - who can, she says, provide the alibi she so desperately needed at her original trial.

Her original state-appointed attorney, Jerry Guerinot, has 21 former clients on death row - more than any other lawyer in the entire country. The state prosecutors who sought her conviction were the same lawyers she had been working alongside at the DEA for the past 20 years.

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