Death Row Has Its Own Gender Gap

At the Mountain View prison unit in Texas, the highest point is not a mountain, but a guard tower, and the most famous person in town is someone most residents will never meet. She is Karla Faye Tucker, a convicted murderer slated for execution on Feb. 3, and she has divided this town as neatly as the state highway that serves as Gatesville's main street.

Some here call for clemency, others call for the ultimate punishment. But whatever their views, everyone in Gatesville knows why Ms. Tucker has gained so much attention.

"She's a woman," says Tammy Hoover, manager of a general store and cafe in this prison town. "If she were a man, nobody would have thought twice about sentencing her to death for her crimes."

If this perspective seems somewhat jaded, there are certainly facts to back up Mrs. Hoover's views. Last year, Texas executed 37 men with hardly a media murmur. But America so rarely executes female prisoners - even those who commit brutal murders, as Tucker did in 1983 - that Tucker's case was bound to capture the nation's attention and to reawaken the turbulent debate over the death penalty, an issue that had grown dormant in these tough-on-crime times.

"It's hard to execute her," says Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based group critical of how capital punishment is administered. "We see someone who looks like our sister or our mother ... someone people find less threatening and easier to identify with."

Gender discrepancy

That could be good news for the 45 women currently on death row around the country. And if statistics are any guide, America's justice system is downright squeamish about executing female felons. According to one study, women account for 1 out of every 8 Americans arrested for murder, but only 1 out of 70 of the people who are sentenced to death row. Of the 432 inmates executed since 1977, when the US lifted a death-penalty moratorium, only one has been a woman. (A North Carolina grandmother who poisoned her fiance was given a lethal injection in 1985.)

"Women are screened out of the process all the way through the criminal-justice system," says Victor Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University who has conducted a study of women and the death penalty.

"Prosecutors are more reluctant to charge women with capital murder, and juries more easily believe that women are under emotional distress while committing a crime," which often leads to lesser sentences.

But while Dr. Streib calls the current sentencing structure "sexist, racist, classist, and arbitrary," he adds that the current media frenzy might help shed some welcome light on a "flawed process." "The Tucker case is causing even Texans to talk about character issues and rehabilitation," Streib says. "The good news is that we might start doing that about men, too."

While the debate about capital punishment can often depend on murky arguments, the evidence of Tucker's guilt is surprisingly clear. On June 13, 1983, she and her boyfriend, Daniel Garrett, broke into a Houston apartment and murdered the two occupants with a pickax. At her brief trial, Tucker admitted her guilt outright and told the jury that no punishment was severe enough for her crimes. But while Tucker requested a life sentence, the jury recommended the death sentence, after a mere 70 minutes of deliberation.

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