Women and the Death Penalty: A Modern History of Women's Executions in the U.S.

When the state of Tennessee sentenced Christa Pike to death on March 30, 1996, she became the youngest woman in the U.S. to face execution in the modern era. She was 20 years old.

Pike was convicted of murdering her classmate Colleen Slemmer when she was 18. On Wednesday, Pike, now 50, was strapped to a gurney and injected with two doses of a drug that was meant to be lethal. Her death would have made her the first woman in Tennessee to be executed in more than 200 years. Only, she didn’t die. The state botched the execution. At the time of writing, Pike is in critical condition and receiving lifesaving care. Tennessee had already botched another execution this year.

Bill Lee, the Republican governor of Tennessee, last week announced he would call off the state’s remaining executions this year and ordered a third-party review into what exactly happened. Pike’s case, meanwhile, has sparked fresh cries for reforms to the criminal justice system — both in Tennessee and across the U.S.

“The state of Tennessee has shown the world it cannot be trusted to implement capital punishment in a way that preserves human dignity and the rule of law,” Laura Porter, executive director of the US Campaign to End the Death Penalty, said in a statement, according to CNN. “This has to stop now.”

Pike is one of only a small number of women to have been on death row in the U.S. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPI), women only accounted for about 3.6% of the more than 16,000 confirmed executions that have taken place in the U.S. since 1632. In the last 50 years, women have made up just 1% of executions. 

Since the Supreme Court lifted the moratorium on death sentences in Gregg v. Georgia in 1976, 18 women have been executed. 

Here’s a brief look at the history of women’s executions in the U.S. over the past 50 years.

The first woman put to death after the 1976 ruling was Velma B. Barfield, a 52-year-old who was executed in North Carolina on Nov. 2, 1984 for the murder of her boyfriend. She was killed by lethal injection.

The most recent execution was on Jan. 3, 2023. Amber McLaughlin, a 49-year-old openly transgender woman, was executed by lethal injection in Missouri for the murder of her former girlfriend. 

Since 1976, executions of women have been carried out by Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia, as well as by the federal government. Of those, Texas has executed the most women: Karla Faye Tucker, Betty Lou Beets, Frances Newton, Kimberly McCarthy, Suzanne Basso and Lisa Coleman.

Using the classifications applied by DPI, 16 of the 18 executions involved crimes in the South. The two exceptions were Lisa Montgomery, who was federally executed in Indiana on Jan. 13, 2021, for a murder committed in Kansas, and McLaughlin, who was executed by Missouri.

DPI data also reports that 13 of the women executed were white, four were Black, and one — Lois Nadean Smith, who was executed in Oklahoma in 2001 — was Native American.

Of the 18 women executed, 16 were put to death by lethal injection. The exceptions were Judy Buenoano, who was executed in Florida’s electric chair in 1998, and Lynda Lyon Block, who was executed by the same method in Alabama in 2002.

That mirrors a broader shift toward lethal injection during the modern death-penalty era. Although states have used methods including hanging, electrocution, the gas chamber and firing squad over the course of U.S. history, lethal injection — which some criminal justice experts have historically deemed to be a more humane and less visibly violent alternative to methods such as electrocution, hanging and the gas chamber — has become the country’s predominant execution method.

All 18 women executed since 1976 were put to death for murder convictions. 

Not every murder conviction is, of course, eligible for the death penalty. In the 27 states that currently allow capital punishment, prosecutors must generally establish at least one legally defined “aggravating circumstance.” These vary by state but can include killing multiple people, committing murder during another felony such as robbery or kidnapping, killing for financial gain, or carrying out a murder deemed especially heinous or cruel.

Whether an eligible defendant receives a death sentence can also depend on whether prosecutors choose to seek it and how jurors weigh those aggravating factors against mitigating circumstances, like the defendant’s age, mental health, background or history of abuse.

The nature of their crimes committed by the women who have been executed in the U.S. over the last 50 years has varied considerably. 

Some were convicted of personally killing their victims, while others were convicted in cases involving accomplices or allegations that they had arranged or participated in killings. 

The victims included spouses, romantic partners, children, and other relatives of the perpetrators.

As of June of this year, 45 women were on death row across the U.S.