THE brother of former Death Row Scot Kenny Richey has claimed he is "poised for release" from a US prison and plans to return to the UK.

Tom Richey is serving a 65-year jail term in the US for murder after being convicted of shooting two people while high on LSD in 1986, killing a shop assistant.

He was on Death Row for a year before he accepted a plea bargain and has spent years battling to secure his freedom. Now he says he has won a major decision in an appeal court which means he will soon be released.

During his time in prison, Richey wrote a book about the case of his older brother Kenny, who spent 21 years on Death Row before his conviction was overturned in January 2008, and he returned to Scotland.

In a letter to the Sunday Herald from Washington State Penitentiary, Richey said: "At the age of 18, I escaped execution in exchange for a fixed sentence of 65 years. That was 30 years ago. While in prison, I educated myself in the law.

"Nine years ago, I discovered I was convicted of a crime that doesn't exist in Washington State's law books. It's been a long and lonely fight through the state and federal courts, but I recently won a major decision in the US Ninth Circuit Court of appeals and I'm now poised for release soon and a return home to the UK."

In the letter, Richey also said he was hoping to be able to write about his story and describe the challenges as he prepares for release, including: "Recording the unknown difficulties of trying to re-assimilate to a society I haven't known since Duran Duran ruled the charts."

The Richey brothers moved to America from Edinburgh to start a new life with their American father James, following the break up of their parents' marriage.

Within just a few years, Tom Richey was sentenced to 65 years in jail and Kenny Richey was on Death Row, after being found guilty of deliberately causing the death of a two-year-old girl by arson.

After being freed in 2008, Kenny Richey returned to Scotland for a year, before going back to live in the US. He was subsequently jailed again for three years after calling and threatening a prosecutor from his original trial, but has since been released.

In previous interviews, Tom Richey has told of how he blamed himself for his brother's Death Row conviction.

"The prosecutor who put him on death row used my admission of guilt for the crime I committed to taint Kenny in the eyes of the court," he said.

He has also spoken of his relationship with his father, who died in 2009. "I know dad blamed himself for my predicament," he said. "I think every parent with a son or daughter in prison blames themselves and wonders where they went wrong.

"But I never blamed my dad for what I did, I blame myself. I ingested LSD. I carried a gun. And I pulled the trigger."

Tom Richey has made repeated efforts to secure his own freedom from prison, but his previous attempts have proved unsuccessful.

In 2004 he was given hope by a US supreme court ruling against excessive sentencing, but it was later ruled this could not apply retrospectively to old cases.

In 2010, his lawyers unsuccessfully tried to argue the charge of "attempted felony murder" made against him was not on the statute books of Washington State, and he should therefore have never been convicted of that offence.

The Washington Court of Appeals later blocked a motion to fight that decision, but last year he launched a fresh appeal, taking the case to the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal.

Richey has spoken of how he turned to studying law in the prison library when he saw there was "no realistic opportunity of escaping over the walls.

In a newspaper article in 2010 he wrote: "One thing I'd learned about serving a life sentence in prison was you must have hope...I struggled through pessimism and despair. I struggled to keep hope alive in my heart.

"My education hadn't advanced much beyond an O-level in art from James Gillespie's High School, so it took me a while to comprehend all I read in Washington State's thousands of volumes of law books."

The Sunday Herald contacted the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and Richey's lawyer for more details on the appeal, but both did not respond.

A spokesman for Washington State Penitentiary said the release date for Richey was October 24, 2038, but added: "This is just an estimated earliest release date and not a set date."