Is gender bias in capital punishment a serious problem?
Though many justifiably express concerns about racial bias in the application of the death penalty, the potential gender bias in capital punishment systems get far less attention. But new horrific killings in Washington state bring up these interesting gendered issues, as this new article from the Seattle Times spotlights. Here are excerpts:
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.”