Will Texas execute a woman next month?

The Death Penalty Information Center now has new coverage on its homepage of the case of Cathy Henderson who “is scheduled to be executed in Texas on April 18 for the 1994 murder of Brandon Baugh, an infant she was babysitting.”   As detailed here and in this television segment, since her arrest “Henderson has maintained that the child’s death was accidental.”  Henderson claims that she dropped the baby, fracturing his skull, and then panicked and fled (after burying the body).

As noted here, Texas is the one state still in the execution business these days.  (DPIC details here that 9 of the 10 US executions in 2007 have been in Texas.)  But Henderson does have a clemency petition pending, and her intriguing “partial innocence” claim might provide a basis for some executive sympathy.  More generally, as DPIC covers here, only 11 of 1067 executed persons in the modern capital era have been women (and I believe most of the executed women committed crimes arguably more heinous than Henderson).

Especially at a time when so many outside of Texas are questioning the death penalty, it will be very interesting to see how much and what kind of attention Henderson’s case gets as her execution approaches.