Eighteen women have been executed in the United States since the Supreme Court lifted the moratorium on capital punishment in 1976. That is a little over one per cent of the executions carried out in that half-century. The number is small enough that the cases can be read one at a time instead of counted, and this archive holds five of them.
Read that way, what varies between them is not the offence. Three of the five were convicted of killing family members or dependants, and two of those turned on poison and money, which is the oldest and least remarkable pattern in the roster. What varies is how the state got from a verdict to a death, and that is the part the phrase conceals.
Velma Barfield was the first. Between 1969 and 1978 she killed at least four people in Robeson County, North Carolina with a rat poison containing arsenic, mixed into food and drink: her mother Lillie Bullard in 1974, two elderly people she was paid to look after, Record Lee in 1976 and Dollie Edwards in 1977, and her fiance Stuart Taylor in February 1978. In each case she had been forging cheques on their accounts and the victim had begun to notice. She was convicted in December 1978.
In prison she became a Christian, worked with other inmates, and attracted a substantial clemency campaign that included Billy Graham. Governor James Hunt refused it during a Senate election. She was executed by lethal injection at Central Prison in Raleigh on November 2, 1984, the first woman put to death in the United States since 1962 and the first since capital punishment was reinstated. She asked for Coca-Cola and Cheez Doodles as a last meal and donated her organs.
That is the first thing the register shows. The question of whether Barfield lived was live enough to attract a national campaign, and it was answered by a governor who was running for the Senate at the time.
Judy Buenoano poisoned her husband and drowned her paralysed son, and was convicted in 1984 of attempting to kill her fiance and of murdering the son, then in 1985 of murdering her husband, which is what carried the death sentence. She was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on March 30, 1998, the first woman executed in Florida since 1848. Sixteen of the eighteen executions in this period were by lethal injection. Hers was one of the two that were not.
Aileen Wuornos is the case where the machinery was not resisting anybody. She shot seven men who had picked her up along the Florida highways between 1989 and 1990, was convicted of Richard Mallory's murder in January 1992, and pleaded to the rest, receiving six death sentences in all. Her defence was self-defence and she abandoned it over the following decade.
In 2001 she asked the courts to stop her appeals. She told them she had killed and robbed the men in cold blood, that she would kill again, and that she was competent and tired of being called crazy. Three state-appointed psychiatrists examined her for fifteen minutes and found her fit. Governor Jeb Bush signed the warrant and she was executed at Florida State Prison on October 9, 2002. Her final statement was about a mother ship.
Fifteen minutes is the whole of the psychiatric record on which the state accepted that a woman asking to die was competent to ask. Whatever view one takes of the appeals she was giving up, that examination is what the file contains.
Kimberly McCarthy was executed in Texas on June 26, 2013 for the murder of her next-door neighbour. Dorothy Booth, seventy-one, was stabbed and beaten to death at Lancaster in Dallas County on July 21, 1997, and McCarthy took her purse and her wedding ring. She was arrested the following day and sentenced to death on November 24, 1998. That sentence was reversed in 2001 and she was resentenced to death on November 1, 2002.
Two other women, Maggie Harding, eighty-one, and Jettie Lucas, eighty-five, had been killed in December 1988. The state connected her to both and used them at the sentencing stage rather than charging them, so she holds one murder conviction against three attributed killings. Her appeals included an argument that Black jurors had been excluded from her trial; eleven of the twelve who sentenced her were white. Her execution was the five hundredth carried out in Texas since capital punishment was reinstated.
Then there is Frances Elaine Newton, and her case is the reason this article is worth rewriting rather than deleting.
On April 7, 1987 her husband Adrian, twenty-three, her son Alton, seven, and her twenty-one-month-old daughter Farrah were shot dead in their apartment in Harris County, Texas. She had taken out life insurance on all three weeks earlier and she led police to a handgun hidden in an abandoned house. She was arrested on April 22 and convicted. Her account was that her husband dealt drugs, that he owed money, and that she had hidden the gun because it was his and she panicked.
Her trial counsel was Ron Mock, a Houston lawyer whose clients accounted for a substantial share of Texas's death row and who was later disbarred. He called no witnesses in mitigation and did not investigate the drug-debt account. Her appellate lawyers argued that a second gun of the same calibre existed and had never been tested, that the nitrite residue on her skirt was consistent with contact with fertiliser rather than gunfire, and that the state's ballistic work had been done by the Houston police crime laboratory, which was closed for reinvestigation in 2002 with thousands of cases sent back for review.
Governor Rick Perry granted her a 120-day reprieve in 2004 to allow testing. The testing that followed was limited and did not resolve the disputed items. The state maintained that the results were inconclusive and the defence maintained that the key evidence had never been examined at all.
She was executed by lethal injection on September 14, 2005, aged forty, having maintained her innocence for eighteen years. She was the first Black woman put to death in Texas since 1858.
This archive's own record of her case puts the position exactly, and it is worth quoting rather than paraphrasing: this is not a case in which innocence has been established; it is one in which serious evidentiary doubts were raised, were not resolved, and the execution went ahead anyway.
That distinction matters because it is the only honest one available. Nobody has shown that Frances Newton did not kill her family. What the file shows is a defence lawyer who did not investigate, a laboratory that was subsequently shut down, a second weapon that was never tested, a reprieve granted to permit testing, and testing that did not answer the question the reprieve was granted for.
Set the five side by side and the pattern is not about the women. Barfield’s life turned on an election. Wuornos’s turned on a fifteen-minute interview she had asked for. McCarthy’s sentence rested partly on two killings the state never charged. Newton’s turned on a laboratory that the city closed three years before she died. Buenoano is the one case of the five where nothing in the process stands out, and she went to an electric chair Florida had not used on a woman since the year before the Gold Rush.
Two further figures belong here. The Death Penalty Information Center records 576 documented executions of women in what is now the United States since 1632, about three and a half per cent of the confirmed total. And since 1973, three women have been exonerated after being wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death.
Two of these five are flagged in this roster as unresolved, and both are Texas. The questions are not the same kind. McCarthy's is a question about how many: one conviction, three attributed killings, two of them put before the court at sentencing without ever being charged. Newton's is a question about whether.
That last number is the one to hold against the eighteen. Three women were taken off death row because their convictions did not hold up. Frances Newton’s did hold up, in the only sense that decides the matter: every court that looked at it let it stand. What the file shows is that the doubts were never answered, and that the testing granted to answer them did not.