Rise in Number of Women Condemned to Die Prompts a Study of Sentencing

No woman has been executed in Florida since 1848, when a slave named Celia was hanged for plunging a knife into her master. But five women are now crowded into Death Row at the Broward Correctional Institution a few miles north of here, and a sixth is likely to join them within weeks.

No state has ever had more women condemned to die.

“It’s very troubling,” says Leigh Dingerson, director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, a Washington-based lobbying group. “While we’re seeing an increase in the death sentence rate, there is no increase in female-perpetrated homicides. So this is not a reaction to a wave of crime, but instead, it’s a wave of prosecutions.”

Dingerson’s group has set up a task force to study sentencing practices, especially in five states--Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama and North Carolina--where more than half of the 40 women on U.S. Death Rows reside.

A pivotal question the study hopes to answer, Dingerson said, is: Is the upturn in death sentences given to women a backlash reaction to gains women have made in other areas of society?

Attorney Jack Wilkins suspects the answer is yes. His client, Virginia Larzelere, is undergoing a psychiatric evaluation after her February conviction in the shotgun murder of her dentist husband, Norman. A Daytona Beach jury recommended the death penalty, and judges usually abide by those recommendations. She would be the sixth woman on Florida’s Death Row.

Wilkins says: “I think the women’s rights movement has made juries understand that they are supposed to treat people the same way, male or female.” He says a Florida statute also mandates death in some cases of aggravated first-degree murder.

None of the five women facing death in Florida has a firm date with Old Sparky, the state’s wooden, three-legged electric chair. Two of the five have been sentenced just this year, and appeals take years.

But the recent surge in condemnations, and the expected arrival of Larzelere, has prompted some redesign at the maximum security prison for women in Pembroke Pines, west of Ft. Lauderdale. Initially, only four cells in the prison’s confinement unit were designated for Death Row inmates, said former Supt. Marta Villacorta. Now, two others set aside for problem inmates will also be used.

As is the case with the 315 men on Death Row at Florida State Prison in Starke, women condemned to die are kept apart from the general inmate population, permitted to socialize only with each other. They are given an hour of exercise daily, when they can play basketball, board games or just sit together on benches in an open-air concrete yard.

During the 23 hours each day they are locked in their 8-by-10-foot cells, they can speak to each other, but cannot see each other. Each cell has a 12-inch black and white TV, bolted to the wall.

“Their day is very routine,” said Villacorta. “Breakfast at 7, lights out at 11.” She said there is “quite a bit of conversation among the women,” and while “in general they have their ups and downs, they remain optimistic that their sentences will be overturned.

“After all,” said Villacorta of executing a woman in the electric chair, “we’ve never done it.”

Only one woman in the United States has been executed since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling that reinstated capital punishment as a state option. She was Velma Barfield, electrocuted in North Carolina in 1984.

Over the same period, 175 men have been killed. Of those, 28 have been executed in Florida.

(In Texas, which has killed 50 men since 1982, a decision is near on Karla Faye Tucker, one of only four women on the state’s Death Row and the first to face execution since Civil War times.)

Women’s death sentences are more often reversed than men’s, perhaps reflecting a societal reluctance to kill women, especially those whose crimes were committed against husbands or boyfriends, or in concert with them. Still, death penalty opponents fear that in a pro-capital punishment state such as Florida, the increase of women on Death Row creates pressure to flip the switch.

Dingerson points out a “dramatic increase in the rate of death sentences given to women just this year--seven since January.”

Researcher Victor Streib, a Cleveland State University law professor, says the recent rate of death sentences in Florida is “astounding, but I suspect it’s a blip rather than a trend. But ask me again in three years and we’ll be able to say for sure.”

On Death Row

Here is where the 40 women sentenced to death are: Florida: 5 North Carolina: 5 Alabama: 4 Oklahoma: 4 Texas: 4 Ohio: 3 California: 2 Missouri: 2 Mississippi: 1 Indiana: 2 Illinois: 2 Kentucky: 1 Nevada: 1 Arizona: 1 Pennsylvania: 1 South Carolina: 1 Tennessee: 1 Source: Victor Streib, Cleveland State University