A new book, ​“Queer (In)Justice” by Joey Mogul, Andrea Ritchie, and Kay Whitlock, explores the expe­ri­ences of les­bian, gay, bisex­u­al, and trans­gen­der peo­ple in America’s crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem, and par­tic­u­lar­ly their inter­ac­tion with the death penal­ty sys­tem. The authors assert that pros­e­cu­tors have used defen­dants’ sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion or gen­der-non­con­form­ing appear­ance to obtain cap­i­tal con­vic­tions: ​“In cap­i­tal cas­es a pros­e­cu­tor must suc­cess­ful­ly under­take what should be a moral­ly dif­fi­cult, eth­i­cal­ly com­plex task of con­vinc­ing a jury or judge to kill anoth­er human being. To suc­ceed, the pros­e­cu­tion must demo­nize, dehu­man­ize and ​‘oth­er’ the defen­dant … the process of dehu­man­iza­tion required to obtain a death sen­tence is eas­i­er when the defen­dant is of a dif­fer­ent race, class, sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and/​or gen­der iden­ti­ty than the jurors or judge.” The authors also under­score the risk of juror bias, ​“Queer peo­ple … are also tried before juries com­prised pri­mar­i­ly of het­ero­sex­u­al, gen­der-con­form­ing peo­ple, whose mem­bers often have beliefs that LGBT peo­ple are deviant and immoral… [P]rosecutors’ use of queer crim­i­nal arche­types alone or in com­bi­na­tion with oth­ers root­ed in race and class often has deadly consequences.”

Among the cas­es dis­cussed in the text is that of Wanda Jean Allen, who was exe­cut­ed in 2001 in Oklahoma for the mur­der of her lesbian partner.

(J. Mogul, A. Ritchie, and K. Whitlock, ​“Queer (In)Justice: The Criminalization of LGBT People in the United States,” Beacon Press, March 2011). See more books on the death penal­ty and Arbitrariness.

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