The state of Texas had no facilities for a condemned woman. When Emma Oliver was moved into a death cell on April 2, 1951, quarters had to be prepared for her below what is now the warden's office at the Huntsville Unit. She was the first woman held on death row under Texas state jurisdiction, and the first Black woman sentenced to die in the state.
She was born on September 10, 1909, a daughter of George Oliver and a woman recorded as Lucinda. She lived in San Antonio and worked as a prostitute. The nickname came from her knife, a long blade she was known to carry, and by the end she was described in the press as one of the most feared women in the city.
In 1934 she killed Rosie Brown. They had argued, and Oliver put the knife into her chest. She received a five-year suspended sentence and did not go to prison.
In 1946 she killed Jerry Eberon. She was sentenced to five years and served eighteen months.
The third was Herman Cohn, thirty-five, a truck driver from Conroe, stabbed to death in her own room in 1950. He was reportedly killed over a debt of three dollars. She was convicted of murder with malice in the Criminal District Court of Bexar County, and the jury assessed death. Her application for a new trial was denied by Judge W. W. McCrory at the end of April 1950, and her lawyers, Sam L. Harrison and Theo P. Henley, took the case to the Court of Criminal Appeals.
That third sentence is what made the case. Only two other women had been condemned in Texas since 1924, and both had their sentences commuted before they ever reached the prison. Oliver did not.
The appeal was heard by the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals and decided on December 13, 1950, with Judge Woodley delivering. It upheld the sentence. A motion for a new trial was denied in February 1951, and the penalty was formally assessed on March 30, 1951 by Judge W. W. McCrory, who set the execution for May 30.
On June 4 the board of pardons and paroles gave her a thirty-day reprieve so the appellate court could deal with a habeas application. That was overruled, and so was another motion for a new trial.
Then, about a week before the date, Governor Allan Shivers commuted the sentence to life. The stated reason was brief: on file were letters and petitions signed by numerous citizens of Bexar County asking for it.
She was moved to the Goree Prison Farm. Around eighteen months later she became ill and lost more than fifty pounds. Shortly after midnight on February 6, 1953 she died of cancer, aged forty-three. Her death certificate gives her burial place only as Seguin Colored Cemetery.
What the case shows is what two of those convictions were worth. A woman stabbed to death in 1934 produced a suspended sentence. A man killed in 1946 produced eighteen months. The third killing, of a white man, produced a death sentence and a cell that had to be built for her.