Gender & the death penalty
Thanks to Doug B. for pointing out this Seattle Times piece on gender bias and the death penalty:
If precedent is an indication, prosecutors may face an additional challenge should they opt to seek the death penalty against Michele Kristen Anderson, 29, charged in the killing of six of her relatives near Carnation Christmas Eve: No woman has been sentenced to die in Washington state.
Of the 3,300 inmates on death row in the U.S. in the last complete count, only 49 were women — less than 1.5 percent. “I think jurors, in general, would have a tougher time imposing the death penalty on a woman,” said Snohomish County Deputy Prosecutor Chris Dickinson, who in 2003 unsuccessfully sought the death penalty against a woman convicted of hiring a group of teens to kill her boss…. Since 1977, nearly 1,100 inmates have been executed in the U.S.; only 11 were women….
Washington state has executed 77 inmates — all men — since 1904. Officials Friday could find only two instances in more than a quarter-century in which Washington prosecutors even asked jurors to sentence a woman to death….
Death-penalty experts disagree over whether the small number of women sentenced to die in the U.S. indicates a bias favoring women. In a 2001 interview, Victor Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University who tracks death-penalty cases against women, said, “It’s like there’s something more valuable about women’s lives … Women are also treated differently when they’re victims.” But Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said, “It could be a bias operating or it could just be there are so few cases of women committing crimes like this. It’s a hard thing to prove one way or another.”
Washington is not alone, such effects have been seen elsewhere. DPIC notes:
Death sentences and actual executions for female offenders are rare in comparison to such events for male offenders. In fact, women are more likely to be dropped out of the system the further the capital punishment system progresses.
- women account for about 1 in 10 (10%) murder arrests;
- women account for only 1 in 50 (2.0%) death sentences imposed at the trial level;
- women account for only 1 in 71 (1.4%) persons presently on death row; and
- women account for only 1 in 92 (1.1%) persons actually executed in the modern era.
Victor L. Streib, “Death Penalty For Female Offenders, January 1973 through September 30, 2004″.
More, I hope, later on this.
Tuesday, 1. January 2008 14:13
One contemptible feature of female capital sentencing in the United States is that white male prosecutors consistently marginalize black female lesbian defendants using sexuality to malign and disparage black female to juries. Scholars largely concede that the United States criminal justice system is a major location of homophobic-based oppression, and consequently, prosecutorial homophobia often becomes central to capital trials involving black lesbian defendants. Prosecutors use the transgression of feminine stereotypes to show the dangerousness of female capital defendants and that lesbian killers deserve the death penalty. One result of prosecutors exploiting lesbianism to denigrate black women in capital cases is that lesbians disproportionately occupy death row. While more than half the women on death row are lesbian, a national study shows that only 0.32 percent of the total United States population is lesbian. This means that lesbians are represented on death row more than 81 times their proportionate representation in the overall society. One scholar explains that 40 percent of women accused of murder contend with prosecutorial assertions of lesbianism to purposefully masculate and dehumanizing them. Prosecutors resort to marginalizing prejudices and stereotypes to render black female defendants more executable to jurors. Disparaging black lesbian capital defendants is usually successful since lesbians rarely sit as jurors. Interestingly, jurors are more than three times as likely to think they could not be fair or impartial toward a lesbian defendant as toward other minority group defendants.