Two high profile murder cases on opposite ends of the country recently drew death penalty attention. Both cases involve women killing young girls. In Florida on Monday, April 13, 2009, prosecutors for the State Attorney’s Office filed papers announcing their intent to seek the death penalty against 23-year-old Casey Anthony who is charged with the first degree murder of her two-year-old daughter, Caylee, last June. In California, Melissa Huckaby appeared in court on Monday, April 13, 2009 in connection with the kidnapping, rape and murder of 8-year-old Sandra Cantu, a playmate of Huckaby’s 5-year-old daughter. District Attorney James Willett charged Huckaby with murder with special circumstances including rape with a foreign object, lewd or lascivious conduct with a child under 14, and murder committed during the course of a kidnapping. While these special circumstances make Huckaby eligible for the death penalty upon conviction, DA Willett said he hasn’t decided yet whether to actually seek the death penalty.

            If convicted, what are the chances these two women will ultimately face state-sanctioned death by lethal injection? Since executions were resumed in this country on January 17, 1977 following a ten-year moratorium, eleven women have been put to death in Oklahoma (3), Texas (3), Florida (2), North Carolina (1), Arkansas (1), and Alabama (1). Only two of those women, Christina Riggs and Francis Newton, were executed for killing children—their own. Both of those cases raised disturbing questions.

            Riggs was a licensed nurse in Sherwood, Arkansas who was convicted of smothering her two preschool-aged children in their beds at the family’s home. She left a suicide note that read: “I hope one day you will forgive me for taking my life and the life of my children. But I can’t live like this any more, and I couldn’t bear to leave my children behind to be a burden on you or to be separated and raised apart from their fathers and living knowing their mother killed herself.” Riggs took 28 Elavil pills which is normally enough to kill anyone, but they did not kill her. Riggs’ death wish, however, was accomplished when, during the penalty phase of her trial, she instructed her attorney not to put on a defense because she wanted to die. The jury fulfilled her wish and the State of Arkansas on May 2, 2000 carried out her wish by putting her to death by lethal injection.

            The question of competency still lingers in the Riggs case.

            The execution of Francis Newton in the Texas death chamber on September 14, 2005 is even more troubling. Newton was convicted of the capital murders of her 7-year-old son, 21-month daughter, and her 23-year-old husband. Prosecutors charged that Newton killed her family to collect a $100,000 life insurance policy. Newton maintained her innocence from the date of her arrest in 1987 to her execution in 2005. She claimed a drug dealer killed her family because of her husband’s drug dealing activities. The Houston police stated that her husband, Adrian, was in fact a drug dealer who was heavily in debt to his supplier.

            Shortly before her execution, attorneys for the Texas Innocence Network presented a 58-page writ of habeas corpus and motion for stay of execution citing three reasons why Newton should not be executed:

• She is actually innocent and would not have been convicted but for the ineffectiveness of her trial counsel.
• Her death sentence rests on inherently unreliable evidence and is unconstitutionally unreliable. No rational jury would have answered the future dangerousness question in the affirmative if Newton had had competent counsel or if the jury had known facts that are presently knowable.
• The State’s inadvertent act of destroying potentially exculpatory evidence precludes the State from going forward with her execution. Prosecution tests of nitrite stains on the dress Newton wore the night of the murders destroyed the evidence, making later defense efforts to determine whether the stains resulted from gunpowder or fertilizer futile. By subjecting the skirt worn by Newton on the day of the murders to a “one-time destructive test”, the State destroyed the only physical evidence offered by the State that purports to connect Newton to the shootings. By destroying it, the State has made it impossible for Newton to prove that the State presented false testimony to the jury, and likewise made it impossible for her to prove that there is no physical evidence linking her to the shootings. Under these circumstances, it offends basic decency and the due process clause to permit the State to go forward with an execution where it has destroyed the evidence that would enable the inmate to establish her innocence.

            The execution of women in this country is exceedingly rare. There have been a total of 568 such documented executions between 1632 when the first woman was executed and 2005 when Francis Newton became the last woman to be executed, representing just 2.8% of all the executions carried out in the United States during that period. Women executions have become even more rare over the last one hundred years with only 40 women being executed As of December 31, 2007, there were 51 women on the nation’s death rows, representing just 1.5% of the total death row population of 3350 at the time.

            While women account for 10% of the arrests for murder in this country, only 1 in 50 (2%) receive the death penalty at trial and only 1 in 100 are actually executed. This means the chances of Melissa Huckaby and/or Casey Anthony fulfilling a date with the executioner should they be convicted of the crimes for which they are charged are slim but not completely improbable. The State of California is tied with Texas with 18 women on its death row and Florida is fourth with 15 on its death row, indicating that juries in California and Florida are not all that squeamish about meting out the death penalty to women.

            Some news media outlets have reported that Huckaby has told authorities that Sandra Cantu’s death was an accident. After all the public outrage has subsided and the facts are developed, there is a very real possibility that the alleged rape of the child victim was not perpetrated by Huckaby. If she did not confess to this horrific act, then the basis for the rape allegations lies in the results from the autopsy which probably produced physical indications of sexual abuse. It may ultimately be revealed that either a male member in the Huckaby family or one in the Cantu family had actually sexually abused the child. Women simply do not rape children with foreign objects. Without corroborating evidence beyond the autopsy report, the State will have a difficult time convincing the jury of this special circumstance. Huckaby’s defense attorneys will certainly be exploring the possibility that the sexual abuse was committed by someone other than Melissa.

SOURCE: The Death Penalty Information Center. Link at:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/women-and-death-penalty