Tracy Housel

Labour MP Vera Baird has urged the prime minister to "pick up the telephone and try to save a life" by intervening in the case of death row Briton Tracy Housel.

Housel is awaiting execution in Georgia, having been on death row since he was convicted of beating and strangling a woman during a two-week crime spree.

His mother, Lula Pellerin, has been calling on the British government to intervene in the case, arguing that such a move represents her son's last realistic chance of being granted clemency. He was born in the British territory of Bermuda, and therefore has British citizenship.

Last month the US Supreme Court rejected his appeal, and he could be executed as soon as March 12. Only the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles now has the power to grant clemency.

And while Baird is urging the prime minister to intervene, human rights campaigners Amnesty International are also launching a demonstration outside Downing Street to keep up the pressure.

Baird told ePolitix.com that the prime minister was in the "best position" to prevent the execution.

"The prime minister himself can approach the authorities in the US. In reliance on his enormously heroic status with the US at the moment, he is in the best position to reiterate the arguments and try to persuade them," she said.

Asked why Housel deserved clemency, Baird cited failings in the judicial process.

"Housel has brain damage, which is clear from the report of at least three psychiatrists, to the extent that his responsibility for what he did was either substantially diminished or completely obliterated. And yet it is proposed to execute him. That is a real condemnation of the philosophy that undermines the death penalty, I think."

Tracy's supporters says that he was represented by a lawyer who had never tried a murder case, and who, in later appeal hearings, the lawyer admitted he made no attempt to ascertain the facts of Tracy's abusive background, nor his medical state. In advising him to plead guilty, his lawyer had deprived him of a possible defence of insanity.

Baird said that the US government was in breach of international human rights conventions.

"We are all party to a number of international human rights agreements and the way this case is being dealt with is, with all the goodwill in the world towards our US allies, in breech of several of them. Consequently if we see such a wrong being done by another country to one of our citizens, it is absolutely incumbent on us to intervene," she told this website.

However, Downing Street has pointed to the work on the case being done by the Foreign Office.

"The decision lies at a local level - we have made it clear that we oppose the death penalty," the prime minister's spokesman said on Wednesday.

Whilst Blair himself has not personally intervened, there has been considerable contact at "consular level" and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, has intervened.

Baird went on to say that there was a connection between the death penalty facing Tracy Housel and the possibility of British al Qaeda prisoners facing the death penalty in Camp X-ray.

She said: "I do see a connection between the al Qaeda prisoners and this man, in the sense that if Tony Blair is prepared to speak out for him he is likely to be prepared to speak out for them."

"If there is ever a similar threat to the al-Qaeda prisoners, I believe the government will take all reasonable steps to protect them, in exactly the way it has taken all reasonable steps to protect Tracy Housel."