Women on US death row face slut-shaming trials and solitary-style confinement, experts say

The 47 women on death row in the US face systemic gender bias from trial to execution, advocates say. Christa Pike is set to be executed in Tennessee in September.

Gender bias on death row: from courtroom slut-shaming to all-male execution teams

As Brenda Andrew sat in an Oklahoma courtroom, a prosecutor held up her thong underwear before the jury. Would a grieving widow, he asked, really wear such a garment? Five witnesses testified about how Andrew dressed — low-cut shirts, short skirts — and described her sexual history. She was called a "hoochie" and a "slut puppy," her attorneys later noted in court records.

Andrew, a Sunday school teacher, was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death in 2004 for the shooting of her estranged husband. More than 20 years on, she remains on Oklahoma's death row.

Her case is one of several examined by usatoday.com in a report on the treatment of the 47 women currently on death row in the United States — and thousands more serving life sentences — who advocates say face conditions that are routinely more demeaning than those experienced by their male counterparts.

"The worst of both worlds"

From arrest to trial to incarceration, the disadvantages compound. Women on death row endure what Stephanie Covington, a Southern California clinician specialising in trauma-informed responses to violence, and Barbara Bloom, a professor emeritus in criminal justice at Sonoma State University, describe bluntly: "Female prisoners receive the worst of both worlds."

That includes being slut-shamed in court proceedings, struggling to access menstrual products in prison, facing unwanted attention from some male guards, and — for those held alone on death row — living in conditions that amount to solitary confinement, with fewer privileges and less socialisation than male inmates.

In Andrew's case, 10th US Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bacharach wrote in 2023 that prosecutors had portrayed her as "a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel," focusing on her sex life throughout the trial, "sparking distrust based on her loose morals" and stripping away any realistic chance the jury would consider her account. The US Supreme Court later ordered a lower court to review her claim of an unfair trial, noting that prosecutors had acknowledged her sex life and failings as a mother and wife were largely irrelevant to whether she killed her husband. The lower court upheld her conviction and death sentence earlier this year.

Lesbianism used to 'defeminise' defendants

Some women are demonised at trial not for their heterosexual conduct but for being lesbians, portrayed as harbouring a hatred of men or being unnatural. Victor Streib, a law professor at Elon University in North Carolina who has researched the treatment of women on death row, writes that jurors can be more reluctant to sentence a woman harshly — and that defence teams and prosecutors alike have exploited that.

"An effective means of defeminizing a female capital defendant is to show the jury that she is a lesbian," Streib wrote. "The more 'manly' her sexuality, her dress, and her demeanour, the more easily the jury may forget that she is a woman."

Failed by their own lawyers

Women on death row have also frequently been failed by male defence attorneys who did not present critical mitigating evidence during sentencing, according to Sandra Lynn Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University who studies gender bias and the death penalty, and Mary Atwell, a retired professor and author who has extensively studied women on death row.

Defence attorneys are duty-bound during sentencing to lay out mitigating factors — including histories of severe trauma — that might spare a client from execution. Atwell said that in her years of research, nearly every woman on death row had experienced childhood abuse and neglect, poverty, mental illness, and subsequent addiction.

"There's almost nobody who had a decent defence lawyer presenting these mitigating circumstances," Atwell said. "Prosecutors very often portrayed them as bad mothers or loose women and in some cases, as lesbians or unnatural women — whatever kind of prejudicial things you could tie onto their lives so by the time they got decent representation, it was too late."

Christa Pike: execution in an all-male prison

The case drawing most immediate attention is that of Christa Pike, whom Tennessee plans to execute by lethal injection in September. Pike was convicted of killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville on 12 January 1995, a murder that drew national attention for its brutality and for both women's youth — Pike was 18 at the time. If carried out, the execution would make her the first woman put to death in Tennessee in more than 200 years.

Pike's so-called "death watch" — the period of close observation in the days immediately before execution, to guard against suicide — will take place in a male prison. Babcock told usatoday.com that the process "will be carried out by men and then the execution team is going to be comprised primarily of men, who will strap her down and kill her."

For someone like Pike, who experienced years of sexual abuse, the all-male environment carries a specific form of torment that male inmates do not face, Babcock said. Pike's background includes multiple rapes, parental neglect, brain damage attributed to prenatal alcohol exposure, and at least one suicide attempt.

Tennessee conducted a botched execution last month. Whether Pike's scheduled execution proceeds despite that incident remains an open question.

A structural problem, not individual cases

Experts are clear that unfair trials are not exclusive to women — men have also faced unjust proceedings. But they argue the nature of the scrutiny is different: women are judged on their appearance, sexual behaviour, and adherence to gender norms in ways that carry distinct weight before a jury.

Babcock frames the issue as structural. The same system that exposes women to harsher social judgement at trial also isolates them more severely once imprisoned, leaving those on death row in conditions close to solitary confinement — and, when the time comes, delivering their deaths at the hands of a largely male team.

Source: The Sun