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The Death Penalty and Gender Discrimination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Elizabeth Rapaport
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Abstract

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Despite the paucity of research on the death penalty and gender discrimination, it is widely supposed that women murderers are chivalrously spared the death sentence. This supposition is fueled by the relatively small number of women who are condemned. This article argues that women are represented on contemporary U.S. death rows in numbers commensurate with the infrequency of female commission of those crimes which our society labels sufficiently reprehensible to merit capital punishment. Additionally, preliminary investigation suggests that death-sentenced women are more likely than death-sentenced men to have killed intimates, although the explanation for this disparity is not yet at hand. It is further argued, on the basis of a content analysis of state capital statutes, that there is a form of gender bias inimical to the interests of women in our capital punishment law: The death penalty is a dramatic symbol of the imputation of greater seriousness to economic and other predatory murder as compared with domestic murder.

Type
Research Article
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 25 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 367 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

I would like to thank David Baldus, Philip Cook, and Alex Keyssar for helpful conversations about gender and the death penalty, and Shari Diamond for invaluable assistance in the preparation of this article. I would also like to thank Charles Dainoff and Anna Tefft for research assistance.

References

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