Convicted and originally sentenced to die in 2002, a woman has become the 500th person executed by the state of Texas since 1982. The death penalty was re-allowed in the entire United States, by the US Supreme Court, back in 1976. Since the 1980s, there have now been a total of 1,338 executions in America. Of that total number, Texas has the highest number of executions, at 500, and the Commonwealth of Virginia follows with 110 executions. Executing women has been pretty rare in the years since 1976, since only 13 of the total executions in America have been women. Three years before the Texas woman’s execution, the last previous woman was sentenced to die in Virginia.
The reasons for delaying the execution in the Texas case were sometimes based on persuasive pleas by the woman’s criminal defense attorney, showing that possible jury problems were important factors in this case. Three delays in her execution came in a single year because of serious questions concerning race. The executed woman, who was African-American, was found guilty by a jury that as mostly white…eleven of the twelve jurors were white. The criminal defense attorney argued that minorities were improperly kept from the jury. Previous trials in this same county (Dallas) have also suffered from allegations of possible jury unfairness, stressed the criminal defense attorney. In 2005, it took the US Supreme Court to stop an execution in Dallas County (with a different defendant that time), after proof of improper race profiling tainted a conviction.
This case also showed the importance of getting experienced criminal advice immediately. Though the murder occurred in 1997, the accused in this case was not arrested until 1998. That same year, she was convicted. An appeal was filed by her criminal defense attorney, who argued that at the time of the original arrest, the woman had been interrogated despite her request that she “wanted a lawyer” present during any questioning. In 2002, an appeals court actually reversed the 1998 conviction. The state of Texas quickly retried the woman, setting in motion the process that juts led to her execution. At the end, the woman thanked her supporters, who had tried one last time to stop the execution. “It’s a win, not a loss,” she said. There remain approximately 357 people on death row in Texas.
