Women in Prison and on Death Row: A Global Analysis | Death Penalty Information Center

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 and jails worldwide. This number is likely higher, as the secretive and closed nature of prisons across the globe makes accessing data challenging. While women represented only 6.8% of the global prison population in 2024, the numbers have surged dramatically over the last 25 years. Since 2000, the number of incarcerated women and girls has risen by nearly 60% — three times faster than the growth in the incarceration of men and boys. “We are facing a global crisis,” said Olivia Rope, executive director of Penal Reform International, noting that women are often treated as an afterthought in prison systems designed primarily for men.

The Guardian notes that poverty, abuse, and discriminatory laws are behind the jump in the number of incarcerated women. Women are disproportionately imprisoned for non-violent offenses such as petty theft (including stealing food for children), begging, drug-related offenses, and informal economic activities. A significant proportion of incarcerated women have mental health problems and histories of abuse. In Europe, suicide rates for women in prison are nine times higher than for the general population, yet mental health awareness and treatment remain limited in many countries.

The same patterns of trauma and survival extend to the most extreme cases. As of 2023, an estimated 500 to 1,000 women were on death rows in at least 42 countries. In 2024, documented executions of women occurred in China (unknown numbers), Egypt (2), Iran (30), Iraq (1), Saudi Arabia (9), and Yemen (2). Most of these women were sentenced to death for murder or drug trafficking.

Research indicates that the majority of women sentenced to death for murder committed their crimes in the context of gender-based violence, often killing in self-defense or while experiencing severe abuse. “Women kill to save themselves — only to face abuse and death again,” The Guardian notes. Countries with mandatory death penalties for murder or those that fail to recognize gender-based violence are more likely to have higher numbers of women on death row.

The Guardian series profiles five women currently on death rows around the world — each case demonstrating the complex intersection of trauma, survival, and systemic failures. Christa Pike is the only women on Tennessee’s death row and one of 47 women on death row in the U.S. as of October 2025. Ms. Pike was born with brain damage caused by her mother’s alcohol abuse during pregnancy, and by age 18, she had been raped twice, and both physically and sexually abused by several individuals. She was sentenced to death for the 1995 murder of Colleen Slemmer, which she committed at age 18, along with Tadaryl Shipp, her 17-year-old boyfriend, while suffering from severe but untreated mental illness. At trial, Ms. Pike’s “state-appointed lawyers failed to present mitigating evidence of her history of sexual violence and child abuse to the jury, leaving the jury with no reason to consider an alternative sentence to the death penalty.” Ms. Pike spent more than 28 years in solitary confinement until she settled a lawsuit arguing she had a right to be treated equally with men on death row, who are housed together and allowed to hold jobs. Ms. Pike’s execution has been set for September 30, 2026.

Leni Limbu, now in her 30s, was convicted in 2015 for murdering her daughter, Tabu, in Tanzania, where death is themandatory sentence for murder. Ms. Limbu is a person with an intellectual disability, and as a child, she was beaten by her father and witnessed the beating of her mother. She was repeatedly raped by men in her village, forcing her to give birth at 15. At about eighteen, she married an older man and had two more children before fleeing his abuse with her one-year-old child, Tabu. In a nearby village, Ms. Limbu met Kijiji Nyambu, an alcoholic who told her they would marry, but he would not accept Tabu as his child. Shortly after, Tabu was found strangled. There were no witnesses and Mr. Nyambu fled by the time authorities were brought to Tabu’s body. At her first trial, Ms. Limbu pleaded not guilty, and unable to read or write, she said she could not understand the statement police claimed she made confessing to killing her child. She said she was beaten, threatened at gunpoint, and detained for two days by police. Her original conviction was nullified in 2019, and in 2022, she was retried and sentenced to death again. The court did not allow evidence to be heard from experts about Ms. Limbu’s intellectual disability or history of abuse. According to Professor Sandra Babcock, faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, and a legal consultant to Ms. Limbu, she should not be held criminally liable because she has an intellectual disability.Professor Babcock noted that this case is “a clear example of the profoundly unjust consequences of Tanzania’s mandatory death penalty. [Ms.] Limbu has been a victim of abuse since childhood and is uniquely vulnerable because of her intellectual disability.” No executions have been carried out in Tanzania since 1994.

Professor Babcock has emphasized that every case has mitigation. “There is not a case out there that has no mitigation… there is always a reason and a story that allows you to understand why this happened.” However, criminal legal systems often fail to acknowledge and address the specific traumas and realities of domestic violence that women endure. Ms. Babcock further noted that “the causal links between experiences of gender-based violence and acts of violence are completely underexplored and part of this is because gender-based violence is normalized to a degree that is still shocking.”

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