death sentences among women
... first in 1632. ∙ Beginning with the earliest American colonial period, female executions constitute about 2.8% (566 / 20,000) of all American executions. ∙ From 1900 to 2002, only 0.6% (49 / 8,131) of all executions were of women. Table 1 below provides these data by year and by executing jurisdiction. ∙ Comparing these post-1900 data with data from previous American eras reveals that this practice is even rarer now than in previous centuries. ∙ Executions of female offenders in the current era (1973-present) are listed in Table 2 below. ∙ Only ten (1.2%) of the 805 total executions since 1973 have been of female offenders. However, the pace of executions of female offenders has picked up significantly during the past five years. Beginning in 1998, nine (2.4%) of the 373 total executions have been of female offenders. ∙ This recent 1998-2002 execution pace matches almost exactly that beginning in 1900, so it appears that the 1973-1997 lull in executions of female offenders was atypical and that we have now returned to our normal rate. ∙ A total of 142 death sentences have been imposed upon female offenders from January 1, 1973 through October 9, 2002. Table 3 below provides these data by individual year. ∙ These 142 death sentences for female offenders constitute less than 2% of all death sentences during this nearly 30-year period. ∙ The typical annual death sentencing rate for female offenders is between two and seven such sentences. ∙ The wide fluctuations during the past decade (from one to ten sentences in a given year) are unexplained by changes in statutes, court rulings, or public opinion. The facts are simple. In 1977, Guinevere Garcia murdered her daughter, and later received a 10-year sentence for the killing. Four months after her release, she killed her estranged husband during a robbery attempt. This time, the court imposed the death penalty. Garcia had refused to appeal her sentence, and opposed efforts to save her. Death penalty opponents turned to Illinois Gov. Jim Edgar, who, as a state legislator, voted to restore the death penalty. The facts of the case swayed his opinion. Just hours before the scheduled execution, Edgar commuted Garcia's sentence to life without parole, his first such act in more than five years in office. The fact that Garcia escaped her execution isn't so unusual. Since the beginning of the colonial era, 20,000 people have been lawfully executed in America, but only 400 of them have been women, including 27 who were found guilty of witchcraft. In the 23 years since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment, 5,569 total death sentences have been given out by courts, 112 to women. Of these 112, only one has been executed (Velma Barfield in 1984), compared with 301 men. Leigh Beinen, a Northwestern University law professor who studies the gender bias in capital cases nationwide, thinks the reason so few women face execution has to do with the symbolism that's central to the death penalty. "Capital punishment is about portraying people as devils," she says. "But women are usually seen as less threatening." Juries and judges tend to find more mitigating factors in capital cases involving women than in ones involving men, Beinen explains. Women who kill abusive spouses, for example, are often seen as victims. Women are more likely to kill someone they know without any premeditation, which is considered less serious than killing a stranger, while some women are presented by defense attorneys as operating under the domination of men. And Garcia's case, according to Edgar, was not "the worst of the worst." "Putting women in docks provokes community ambivalence," says Beinen, pointing out that by the end of the Susan Smith trial last year, which left the young mother convicted of drowning her two toddler sons, initial demands for the death penalty had largely petered out. Victor Streib, a leading expert on gender bias, has shown that while women comprise 13 percent of U.S. murder arrests, they account for only 2 percent of the death sentences, and make up only 1.5 percent of all persons presently on death row. These last two figures have remained steady for 20 years. Streib says prosecutors try to "defeminize" defendants by portraying them as lesbians- even if they're not- or prone to violence, gang leaders or having other traits contrary to "natural female patterns." But prosecutors still have a tough time overcoming defense tactics that include profuse crying, bodily shaking and a head hung in shame, histrionics that disturb Streib. "It lumps women in with the retarded and children by implying that they can't control their own actions," he says. Streib, who teaches at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, and has compiled three studies of gender bias in capital punishment, has spoken before groups opposed to the death penalty, but says they haven't used his research because they are afraid of "stirring the pot" by giving aid to death penalty advocates. Anyway, he says, he's a scholar, not a politician, and his goal is to "explain the unexplained" and provide ammunition for the debate. Beinen makes no secret of her opposition to capital punishment, and says she was "happy" to see Garcia's sentence commuted. Beinen has received a few letters from men who are fighting their death sentences on the grounds of gender bias, but though she says the death penalty is unfair, she is pessimistic about these challenges. Gender bias challenges would run into the same obstacles as racial challenges, Streib says. In McClesky v. Kemp, the Supreme Court ruled that death-row defendants cannot argue a general pattern of racial bias in capital cases. Instead, a defendant must prove that race affected his or her specific case, a precedent that Streib thinks will block any gender suit. He predicts someone will push legislative action dealing with gender bias, and that it will be something along the lines of the failed Racial Justice Act, which would have allowed capital defendants to use statistics to challenge race bias . "But it's not likely there will be a cure," he says. So will anything change? Probably not, according to Streib. Because of the powerful symbolism of execution, he doesn't think the rising anti-crime mood of the country will lead to any great increase in the number of women on death row. And while Beinen hopes that gender-bias research will make people aware that capital punishment is all about "symbolism and politics," Streib is more guarded. "We'll probably have another execution in the next 23 years," he says. "I expect one soon, but I've been saying that for a while now." May 04, 2000 | O n Tuesday night in Varner, Ark., 28-year-old Christina Marie Riggs was executed for the 1997 murders of her two small children. She was given a lethal injection of potassium chloride, the drug she had originally planned to use to kill her children. (She suffocated them after a botched attempt of the drugging plan.) Riggs, a former nurse, was put to death despite pleas for her life from anti-death-penalty groups including Amnesty International and the American Civil Libertes Union. In fact, there was little difference between the execution of Riggs and the other 28 executions carried out in the United States so far this year, except that Riggs, who said she wanted to die to be with her "babies," had refused to appeal her sentence or to seek clemency from Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. And yet her death was much bigger news. The cause for intense public soul-searching and beating of breasts was not the nature of Riggs' crime or her wish to die. It was her gender. It was, for all intents and purposes, a demonstration of garden-variety sexism. And this isn't the first time our hypocrisy has been blatantly displayed. Riggs was the first woman to be executed in Arkansas in 150 years, and only the fifth executed in the nation since the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment in 1976. Obviously, the very rarity of women's executions makes them newsworthy. But this is only the statistical manifestation of the stubborn gender discrimination that taints our attitude about capital punishment in this country. Whether one sees the death penalty as justice or barbarism (and, for the record, I have no moral objection to imposing it for premeditated murder, though the risk of the state taking an innocent life is troubling enough to warrant opposition to the practice), surely the perpretrator's gender should be irrelevant. But that is not the way it works in the real world. We are consistently more likely to seek mitigating circumstances for women's heinous deeds, to see female criminals as disturbed or victimized rather than evil. The thought of a woman in the death chamber makes people cringe -- even those who have no problem with sending a man to his death for his crimes. It appears that chivalry still lives when a woman must die. Two years ago, there were many more headlines and much more debate as Karla Faye Tucker awaited execution in Texas for a brutal double murder. Tucker had become a born-again Christian and her clemency petition was backed by such unusual suspects as Christian Coalition leader Pat Robertson, Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell and right-wing hero Oliver North -- all generally pro-capital punishment. While most of Tucker's champions insisted that redemption and not womanhood was the issue, none had intervened on behalf of male murderers who had experienced similar death-row conversions. And there was ample evidence to suggest that the support for "this sweet woman of God," as Robertson put it, was not entirely gender-neutral. On CNN's "Crossfire," when asked if the crusade to save Tucker was an instance of "misplaced chivalry," North gallantly replied, "I don't think chivalry can ever be misplaced" -- though he went on to insist that "gender is not a factor." Meanwhile, on the left, the chivalrous Geraldo Rivera dispensed with any pretense of neutrality and issued a bizarre plea to Texas Gov. George W. Bush on his CNBC show: "Please, don't let this happen. This is -- it's very unseemly. Texas, manhood, macho swagger ... What are ya, going to kill a lady? Oh, jeez. Why?" The lady in question, by the way, had used a pickax to dispatch two sleeping people (one of whom had made her angry by parking his motorbike in her living room) and later bragged that she experienced an orgasm with every swing. The first woman executed by the Americans, as distinct from the British, was Basheba Spooner in the State Massachusetts in 1778. She was accused of killing a Sergeant in the Royal Army who she said stole her virtue. She pleaded that she was pregnant, but the plea was rejected and she was hanged. An autopsy showed that she was indeed pregnant. In total, it is thought that about 552 women have been executed in America since colonial times, of which some 504 were hanged, including 6 juveniles. (see separate article). This constitutes about 2.6% of the 19,200 or so total executions. Martha Place became the first of 26 women (including one juvenile) to die in the electric chair when she was executed on March 20th, 1899 at New York's Auburn prison for the murder of her step daughter Ida. Ethel Juanita Spinelli was the first to die by lethal gas in California on 11/21/41. Three women have been executed under Federal authority. Mary Ann Surratt was hanged with her fellow conspirators at Fort Mc Nair on July 7th, 1865 for their parts in the assassination of President Lincoln. In 1953 Ethel Rosenburg and Bonnie Heady were put to death. Ethel Rosenburg and her husband Julius were electrocuted for espionage on June 19th, 1953 and Bonnie Heady went to the gas chamber on December 18th, 1953, along with her lover Charles Hall, for the kidnap-murder of 6 year old Bobby Greenlease in Kansas City. 129 women have been sentenced to death between 1977 and the end of 2000 and 54 were on death row as of 10/01/02. Ten women have been executed since the resumption of executions in 1977. They are Velma Barfield, who was put to death in North Carolina by lethal injection on November 2nd, 1984. Karla Faye Tucker suffered the same fate in Texas on February 3rd, 1998 for a double murder and Judy Buenoano, dubbed Florida's "Black Widow" was electrocuted on March 30th, 1998 for husband murder. Betty Lou Beets was executed by injection for husband murder in Texas on February 24th, 2000 and Christina Marie Riggs also received a lethal injection for the murder of her two small children on May 3rd, 2000 in Arkansas. She fought strenuously for the right to die. During 2001 Oklahoma emptied its female death row and executed all three women on it. Wanda Jean Allen became the first black woman to be executed since 1954 and the first in Oklahoma since 1903, when she was given a lethal injection on the January 11th, 2001 for the murder of her lesbian lover. Marilyn Kay Plantz followed her on the May 1st, 2001 for organizing the murder of her husband. One of her male accomplices was executed for his part in the killing in 2000. Lois Nadean Smith was executed for the July 4th, 1982 murder of 21-year-old Cindy Baillee whom she suspected of plotting to murder her son, Greg. She was given a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary on December 4th, 2001. On the 10th May 2002 Lynda Lyon Block became probably the last woman to suffer death in the electric chair when she was executed in Alabama for the murder of a police officer on 10/4/93 in Opelika. Serial killer, Aileen Wournoss was put to death by lethal injection in Florida on the 9th October 2002 for the robbery/murder of Richard Mallory. She confessed to killing 6 other men and had volunteered for execution. Many states have been unwilling to execute female offenders while perfectly willing to execute males. Texas carried out 441 executions between 1930 and 1977 but not one was of a woman. Other states seem also to find any reason not to execute w...