The Feminist Case for Ending the Death Penalty

The Feminist Case for Ending the Death Penalty
7/13/2021 by Stephen Rohde
Women have been at the forefront of the movement to abolish the death penalty because they have every reason to oppose this inhumane punishment.

Lisa Montgomery was executed by lethal injection on Jan. 13 at a facility in Terre Haute, Ind., that bears the Orwellian name “Federal Corrections Complex.” The first woman executed by the federal government since 1953, Montgomery was among 13 inmates killed in the waning days of the Trump administration. Kelley Henry, one of the lawyers who tried to save Montgomery’s life, noted in a statement that “our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution.” She described her client as a “victim of unspeakable torture and sex trafficking” who suffered from long-term debilitating mental disease, including psychosis and auditory hallucinations.

Montgomery’s death sent me in search of a feminist case against the death penalty.
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The Movement to Abolish the Death Penalty

For decades, the movement to abolish the death penalty has been driven by strong and outspoken women who serve as public defenders, lawyers, activists, elected officials, judges, teachers and scholars, and who are the mothers, sisters and partners of the victims of brutal killings and the people who have been convicted of those killings. Nearly 20 years ago, in “A Feminist Look at the Death Penalty,” published in Law and Contemporary Problems, Amy E. Pope pointed out that in all the debate over the death penalty, “no one has suggested how a feminist perspective might improve the discussion.” She observed that the decision to impose the death penalty presents “traditionally male ways of looking at the problem … that offer only limited views of the world, boiling choices down to black and white.” She reasoned that “imposing a feminist lens on the procedure will round out the largely one-sided argument” by paying “attention to bias and power disparity” without “perpetuating a system of white, male, middle-class bias with the most extreme results for all marginalized groups.”
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Feminists have every reason to be suspicious of capital punishment. Death penalty laws in the U.S. were enacted by legislatures dominated by men; death sentences are sought by prosecutors who are predominately men; juries that condemn defendants to death have historically been mostly male; and judges who sentence defendants to death are overwhelmingly male.
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Over the 45 years since the reinstatement of capital punishment, juries in criminal cases have also been predominantly male. Indeed, the U.S. has a shameful record when it comes to women serving on juries. It would take until 1994 for the Court to rule in J.E.B. v. Alabama ex rel T.B. that peremptory challenges to prospective jurors on the basis of gender were unconstitutional. State courts, too, have always been overwhelmingly male. In 2008, 75 percent of these judges were men. By 2014 the number of female state court judges had reached only 30 percent. The American Constitutional Society, which keeps track of such things, reported in a study published in 2016, “Not a single state has women on the bench in the numbers commensurate with their representation in the general population.” And the percentage of women prosecutors likewise lags far behind, at only 24 percent in 2019. “The principles underlying feminism are wholly consistent with opposition to the death penalty,” Cassandra Stubbs, director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, said. “Abolitionists and feminists both reject a dehumanizing punitive, carceral approach to violence that turns a blind eye to systemic inequalities. Both seek to disrupt systems that dehumanize individuals and over-incarcerate while working to change the social conditions of injustice that contribute to cycles of violence and trauma.”

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https://msmagazine.com/2021/07/13/feminist-ending-death-penalty-capital-punishment-women/