Women

Christa Pike, the only woman on Tennessee’s death row, has filed a law­suit in the Davidson County Chancery Court chal­leng­ing the state’s lethal injec­tion pro­to­col, assert­ing it vio­lates her con­sti­tu­tion­al rights and con­flicts with her reli­gious beliefs. The state’s new exe­cu­tion pro­to­col relies sole­ly on pen­to­bar­bi­tal to induce res­pi­ra­to­ry and car­diac arrest, rather than the for­mer three-drug cock­tail. Ms. Pike argues that Tennessee’s lim­i­ta­tion on clergy,…

The Guardian’s recent four-part series exam­ines the expe­ri­ences of women in prison around the world, with a focus on those fac­ing the death penal­ty. The series illu­mi­nates a large­ly over­looked issue with­in glob­al crim­i­nal legal sys­tems: the fail­ure to rec­og­nize how gen­der-based vio­lence shapes women’s jour­neys to incar­cer­a­tion and death row. The glob­al incar­cer­a­tion of women has reached its high­est lev­els, with more than 733,000 women and girls held in prisons…

In​“Gendered Capital Punishment,” Cornell Law School Clinical Professor Sandra Babcock exam­ines how the gen­der of actors in cap­i­tal cas­es affects out­comes for women defen­dants. Professor Babcock’s research doc­u­ments that 96% of women cur­rent­ly sen­tenced to death in the US were pros­e­cut­ed by male pros­e­cu­tors, 89% appeared before male judges, and more than one-third had exclu­sive­ly male deci­­sion-mak­ers through­out their cas­es. These sta­tis­tics are rel­e­vant, says…