New Podcast: Women and the Death Penalty, With Expert Guest Mary Atwell

“We live in a gen­dered soci­ety,” says Dr. Mary Atwell (pic­tured), one of the nation’s fore­most experts on women and cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and the men and women who go to death row are dif­fer­ent. In the lat­est pod­cast episode of ​“Discussions with DPIC,” com­mem­o­rat­ing Women’s History Month, Dr. Atwell says why that is so. 

Dr. Atwell chose to write about women on death row because she ​“want­ed to do some­thing about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment that was not just num­bers, that was a human take on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment.” In the pod­cast, DPIC staff mem­bers Anne Holsinger and Robin Konrad inter­view her about pat­terns in cas­es in which women have been sen­tenced to death, includ­ing the nature of the crimes, the defen­dants’ his­to­ries of phys­i­cal and sex­u­al abuse and addic­tion, and pros­e­cu­tor and media stereo­typ­ing of female cap­i­tal defen­dants as vio­lat­ing gen­der norms. They also dis­cuss how women are affect­ed dif­fer­ent­ly than men by sys­temic issues, such as inad­e­quate defense and jury bias.

“Women who have been sen­tenced to death are much more like­ly than the men who are sen­tenced to death to have com­mit­ted a mur­der of an inti­mate per­son, rather than a stranger,” Dr. Atwell says. She explains that, ​“for the state to put some­body to death in our name, we have to see them as ​‘oth­er’ in some way – … and I think that’s even more true with a woman. You have to see her as not just doing things that are vio­lent and cru­el, but as par­tic­u­lar­ly out­side the expec­ta­tions of what a woman should do.” That is why, she says, in cas­es in which women are sen­tenced to death and exe­cut­ed, pros­e­cu­tors and the press ​“played up to a great extent” that ​“these were women who stepped out­side the norms of gendered expectations.” 

Dr. Atwell is Professor Emerita of Criminal Justice at Radford University and author of three books on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, most recent­ly Wretched Sisters: Examining Gender and Capital Punishment.