In 1981, at the age of eighteen, Kenny Richey left his home in Scotland to live with his American Father in Ohio State.
In June 1986, one week before his return to the United Kingdom, Kenny was arrested for a crime the evidence shows was not a crime at all.
Since his conviction some months later, he has been sitting on death row. The State remains keen to execute him.

Denied Right to prove innocence
During the months preceding 21 March 1997, evidence was presented to the Ohio Court of Common Pleas, conclusively establishing the innocence of Kenny Richey.

This compelling evidence was submitted to support a bid for a hearing to allow Kenny's defence team to show that the case was a tragic miscarriage of justice.
The state prosecution did not dispute the accuracy of the new evidence.
Prosecution Dan Gershutz said, "Even though this new evidence may establish Mr Richey's innocence, the Ohio and United States constitution nonetheless allow him to be executed because the prosecution did not know that the scientific testimony offered at the trial was false and unreliable."
Without setting any reasons, Judge Michael Corrigan agreed, (Judge Corrigan was the foreman of a panel of three judges who convicted Kenny then sentenced him to die by electrocution). He refused the defences request for an evidentiary hearing and dismissed Kenny's appeal. Thus Kenny was denied the right to prove his innocence of the crime for which was convicted

From America By Irvine Welsh (Filed: 12/05/2003)
How an innocent Briton ended up on death row

Wherever they take place, miscarriages of justice tend to have the same depressing characteristics. They usually involve somebody profiting career-wise from a closed justice system, which appears totally convinced of its own infallibility, irrespective of all evidence to the contrary.
The nightmare of Edinburgh man Kenny Richey, who has been on death row in America since 1986, is drawing to a potentially tragic finale [report, 10 May]. In the early hours of June 30 of that year, a fire started in an upper flat in a Columbus Grove apartment building in Ohio's Putnam County. Firemen quickly extinguished the blaze, but carried out the body of a child named Cynthia Collins, who died in her room from smoke inhalation.
Hope Collins, Cynthia's mother, had left the flat and driven off with her boyfriend to spend the night at his house. Hope regularly left Cynthia unattended, sometimes feeding her sleeping pills before doing so. The welfare services had contacted her on two occasions regarding those practices.
Cynthia's body was taken to St Rita's Medical Centre, where Hope told a doctor that her daughter had previously started fires in the apartment. The local fire service verified this had happened on two separate occasions.
This mournful story of neglect is disturbing enough. How it led to a young Scotsman ending up on death row is the stuff of terror. Amnesty International called it "one of the most compelling cases of innocence human rights campaigners have ever seen". more