A Briton who has spent 20 years on death row in an American prison will be freed today, his lawyer said yesterday.

Kenny Richey, 43, once came within an hour of being executed but has agreed a plea deal that will allow him to come home to Edinburgh. Richey was put on death row in January 1987 after being convicted of starting a fire in which Cynthia Collins, aged 2, died. His conviction was overturned this year.

Human rights campaigners welcomed the news of his pending release, with his lawyer describing it as a “complete victory”. Ken Parsigian, his lawyer, said: “It is the greatest Christmas present that I or Kenny could have asked for. Kenny is excited and he is thrilled. He is a little nervous as he now has to find a way to get back into the real world.”

He is expected to fly from Ohio to Edinburgh tomorrow. He left his mother’s home in Edinburgh aged 18 to live with his American father.

At a court hearing today he will plead no contest to attempted involuntary manslaughter, child endangering and breaking and entering. He will be sentenced to time already served. A no-contest plea is not an admission of guilt, but a statement that no defence will be presented. It is treated as a guilty plea by the courts.

Karen Torley, his former fiancée, who helped to lead the fight for his freedom, said: “It was something I had always expected to happen. I just did not expect it to happen now. I am delighted for him and his family. It was always a disgrace that the Ohio justice system found Kenny guilty in the way it did and totally shocking that they put him on death row then fought tooth and nail to keep him there. The authorities have effectively accepted that they never had a case in the first place.”

During Richey’s trial, prosecutors had claimed that he started the fire as a jealous attack on his former girlfriend and her new lover, who lived in the flat below. Richey always protested his innocence and refused a plea bargain that would have led to an 11-year sentence for arson and manslaughter.

On August 10 the Cincinnati Court of Appeal overturned his sentence. He was moved from the notorious Mansfield Correctional Institution in September to the low-security Putnam County Prison.

Clive Stafford Smith, a director of Reprieve, which campaigns against the death penalty, said: “An innocent man gets a death sentence because he had an incompetent lawyer at trial, his conviction is reversed two decades later, and then he has to enter a plea to avoid a second death sentence. It was the right thing to do — nobody can expect him to trust a system that already got it so terribly wrong — but it’s an insane process nevertheless.”

Kate Allen, of Amnesty International UK, said: “He now joins the ranks of those released from American death-row prisons when they should never have been there in the first place.”

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