Executing Female Offenders: Capital Punishment and the Law
This paper presents a socio-legal literature review on the execution of female offenders in the United States. It traces the legal history of capital punishment from colonial times through landmark Supreme Court decisions, outlines the crimes that qualify for the death penalty, and documents the stark statistical disparity between male and female death sentences and executions. Drawing on research by Streib, Rappaport, and others, the paper examines notable cases of women sentenced to death, profiles the twelve women executed since 1976, and explores competing theories — including domestic abuse normalization, differential criminal histories, sexism, and socialization — that may explain why women account for such a small fraction of those executed.
- Introduction: Gender gap in death sentences and executions
- Background History of Capital Punishment: U.S. capital punishment history and key Supreme Court rulings
- Crimes That Warrant Capital Punishment: Crimes eligible for the death penalty by state
- The Death Penalty and Women: Statistical disparity between male and female executions
- Notable Cases and Executed Women: Profiles of women sentenced and executed since 1976
- Theories Regarding the Reduced Number of Female Executions: Sexism, domestic abuse, and socialization as explanations
- Conclusion: Socialization and implicit bias shape gendered sentencing outcomes
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What makes this paper effective
- Grounds its argument in concrete statistics throughout, drawing on multiple sources (Streib, Rappaport, the Death Penalty Information Center) to establish the gender disparity rather than relying on assertion alone.
- Moves logically from legal history to case-level evidence to theoretical explanation, giving the reader a clear framework for understanding why the disparity exists.
- Presents multiple competing theories — domestic-abuse normalization, differential criminal records, outright sexism, and socialization — without forcing a single conclusion, which reflects scholarly balance.
- Uses specific named cases to illustrate abstract patterns, making the statistical argument concrete and memorable.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates effective use of a socio-legal literature review as a genre: it synthesizes legal precedent (Supreme Court cases) with sociological research (Streib, Rappaport) and empirical data (Death Penalty Information Center statistics) to build a multi-layered argument. This cross-disciplinary synthesis — rather than treating law and sociology as separate — is what gives the analysis its depth.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a statistical framing in the introduction, then provides historical and legal context for capital punishment before narrowing to the gendered application of the death penalty. A case-evidence section profiles specific women and lists all twelve executed since 1976. The penultimate section surveys theoretical explanations for the disparity, and a brief conclusion reflects on socialization and implicit bias as overarching explanations.
Introduction
Women are far less likely than men to be sent to death row for their crimes, even when sentenced for the same offenses. Females account for about one in eight (13%) murder arrests, one in 72 (1.4%) death sentences, and one in 140 (0.7%) actual executions. Of the more than 8,000 individuals executed since 1900 through the start of the millennium, only 44 (0.5%) were women (Streib, 2001).
This paper presents a socio-legal literature review on capital punishment in the United States, covering its legal history, the crimes that warrant it, the discrimination that exists between males and females in receiving the death sentence, and concluding with speculations regarding the factors that account for the relatively small representation of women on death row.
Background History of Capital Punishment
Capital punishment has a long history in America. The first recorded American execution took place in 1608 (Bakken, 2010), and the Espy file lists 15,269 people executed in the United States between 1608 and 1991. Some 4,661 executions occurred between 1930 and 2002 alone, most of them in the first two decades of that period — years marked by the upheavals of World War II and the Cold War.
The modern death penalty was formalized in the early 1970s and then suspended from 1972 to 1976 as a result of the Supreme Court's decision in Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972). In various capital punishment cases, the practice had been found to constitute cruel and unusual punishment, leading the Court to declare execution unconstitutional and contrary to the principles of the Eighth Amendment. Justices Thurgood Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. held that the death penalty utterly contradicted the Eighth Amendment and constituted "cruel and unusual" punishment.
In 1976, however, 37 states moved to reinstate the death penalty (Banner, 2002). The Furman decision had been a five-to-four ruling — not unanimous — and Justices Byron White and Potter Stewart had upheld the death sentence with the proviso that it be applied only in certain very limited and rare instances. Most states that enacted new death penalty statutes did so using White and Stewart's conditions as their legal foundation.
Two subsequent restrictions were placed on the use of the death penalty. The first was Atkins v. Virginia (June 2002), in which the Supreme Court determined that executing mentally disabled criminals constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" and that any individual with an IQ below 70 was considered to have an intellectual disability. Prior to that ruling, between 1984 and 2002, forty-four intellectually disabled individuals had been executed (Bakken, 2010; Banner, 2002). The second restriction came in 2005 with Roper v. Simmons, 543 U.S. 551 (2005), which prohibited the execution of individuals who were under 18 years of age at the time of their offense.
New Jersey and New Mexico subsequently repealed their death penalty statutes. New Mexico, in 2009, replaced the death penalty with life imprisonment; however, because the law was not retroactive, offenders who committed crimes before that date could still be sentenced to death. Between 1976 and 2009, 1,210 people were executed, with most executions occurring after 1990. Texas recorded the highest number of executions — more than a third of the national total, and four times as many as Virginia, which ranked second. California, by contrast, had the largest number of prisoners on death row but imposed the fewest actual executions (Death Penalty Information Center).
Sources
Baker, David V. (1999). A descriptive profile and socio-historical analysis of female executions in the United States: 1632–1997. Women and Criminal Justice, 57.
Bakken, G. M. (2010). Invitation to an execution: A history of the death penalty in the United States. University of New Mexico Press.
Banner, Stuart (2002). The death penalty: An American history. Harvard University Press.
Crocker, P. (2001). Is the death penalty good for women? Buffalo Criminal Law Review, 917.
Death Penalty Information Center. Women and the death penalty. Retrieved from http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/women-and-death-penalty
Dow, D. R., & Dow, M. (2002). Machinery of death: The reality of America's death penalty regime. Routledge.
Rappaport, E. (2000). Equality of the damned: The execution of women on the cusp of the 21st century. Ohio Northern University Law Review, 26, 581.
Streib, V. L. (2001). Sentencing women to death. Criminal Justice Magazine, 16, 1–10.
Streib, V. L. (1990). Death penalty for female offenders. University of Cincinnati Law Review, 58, 845.
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