Teresa Lewis, a 41-year-old Virginia woman who admitted murdering her husband and his son, has run out of appeals and is set to be executed Thursday. Her co-conspirators were given life without parole, and Lewis' attorneys have argued that new evidence shows they were actually the masterminds of the plot -- therefore her sentence is unfair. She also has an IQ of 72, which means she's borderline mentally retarded.
Nearly all the stories I've seen mention how rare it is for women to be executed; she would be the only woman to be executed in the country in five years -- in Virginia it's been nearly a century. I understand the desire of news writers to point out rarities; it makes the story more important. But in this case, it also implies that most of the 1,226 other executions the United States has carried out since 1976, the vast majority of which are of men, are normal.
Assumptions we make about men always come up -- explicitly or implicitly -- in conversations about women. When we talk about women in combat roles in the military, we talk about the things women can physically do and the things they can emotionally handle. But the underlying assumption is that men can handle the terrors of combat when, increasingly, we see that they actually cannot; combat is damaging physically and emotionally to anyone who experiences it. When we talk about women moving up in their careers, we always assume that the qualities men are perceived to have -- swagger and confidence -- are what's getting them through the door, and the lack of them holds women back. The fact that men are doing most of the hiring, and could be rewarding the qualities they would recognize in themselves, doesn't come up.
The idea that men are inherently violent, and especially the prejudice that describes black men as especially violent, serves those men poorly, but is also bad for the criminal-justice system as a whole and everyone else. Stories about an inmate facing the death penalty wouldn't mention race unless it was germane for a particular reason: mentioning gender in this instance should be uncalled for, too. What is important is that the crime was particularly heinous and there are questions lingering about the case: how often we execute women doesn't have a role to play in conversations about problems with the death penalty.
-- Monica Potts
