Victor Streib, who has been research­ing the sub­ject of women and the death penal­ty for 20 years, has released an updat­ed ver­sion of his report ​“Death Penalty for Female Offenders.” In his research, Prof. Streib, a pro­fes­sor at Elon University School of Law in North Carolina and Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law, has found that women are sig­nif­i­cant­ly less like­ly than men to receive a death sen­tence, pos­si­bly because pros­e­cu­tors seem less inclined to seek the death penal­ty against female offend­ers. He not­ed , ​“Women [are charged with] rough­ly 10 to 12 per­cent of the mur­ders in the coun­try. They get about 2 per­cent of the death sen­tences and get less than 1 per­cent of the actu­al exe­cu­tions.” He also not­ed that it is impos­si­ble to know why pros­e­cu­tors decide to seek the death penal­ty in some cas­es but not others.

Streib’s report noted:

  • 162 women have been sen­tenced to death since 1973.
  • In 1984, Velma Barfield was the first woman to be exe­cut­ed since the rein­state­ment of the death penal­ty in 1976.
  • Of the 1,099 exe­cu­tions in the United States since the rein­state­ment of the death penal­ty, 11 were women.
  • The last exe­cu­tion of a female offend­er was in Texas in 2005.
  • Of the 51 women on death row, 12 killed their hus­bands or boyfriends and 11 killed their chil­dren. Two killed both their hus­bands and their children.

(“Professor stud­ies women on death row,” by Mike Wilder, Times-News (Burlington, NC), February 18, 2008). See Women and Resources.

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