High Court Won’t Block Woman’s Execution

The U.S. Supreme Court refused Monday to consider an appeal from Texas death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker, clearing the way for the first execution of a woman in Texas since the Civil War.

One of seven women on Texas’ death row, Tucker is expected to be executed by lethal injection early next year in the death chamber of the Huntsville State Prison, about 70 miles north of Houston, officials said.

“There’s really no appeals left in the courts for her,” Assistant Dist. Atty. Roe Wilson said. “But she can still go to the governor” to seek clemency, she said.

Tucker, 38, and an accomplice were sentenced to die for the June 1983 murders of a northeast Houston couple, who were beaten to death in their bed with a pickax and hammer. Her accomplice, Daniel Garrett, died of liver disease in prison in 1993.

Tucker would become only the second woman executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976. Velma Barfield was put to death in North Carolina in 1984.

A woman has not been executed in Texas since 1863, when Chipita Rodriguez was hanged near Corpus Christi for murdering a horse trader, officials said.

“I think the fact that she is a woman is totally irrelevant,” Wilson said of Tucker’s pending execution. “What is relevant is that she committed the offense, she admitted to committing the offense and she bragged about it after.”

A professed born-again Christian, Tucker has spent the past 13 years on the death row for women in Gatesville, about 30 miles east of Waco.