A rare female execution will take place in Texas on Tuesday. Kimberly McCarthy is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. She will be the first woman sentenced to death in the United States in more than two years, for stabbing and murdering her neighbor in 1997.
Women are not often executed with only 12 women being punished by death since 1976, when t he death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court. In Sept. 2010, Teresa Lewis was the last woman to be executed.
Federal Bureau of Justice Statistics from 1980 to 2008 exemplify that women are about 10 percent of homicide offenders in the U.S.
"Although women commit about 10 percent of murders, capital cases also require some aggravating factor like rape, robbery, or physical abuse," said Richard Dieter, executive director of Death Penalty Information Center to Reuters. "It's unclear whether jurors or prosecutors may be more lenient in potential prosecutions of women, since there are relatively few."
McCarthy 51, was convicted of murder after she entered the home of her 71-year-old neighbor Dorothy Booth in Lancaster, Texas in July 1997. She said she wanted to borrow sugar but then went on to stab her five times and cut off her left ring finger to take her diamond ring.
"(McCarthy) quite literally took the woman, put her left hand on a chopping block of the kitchen and then used a knife to sever her ring finger while she was still alive," said Greg Davis, the former Dallas County assistant district attorney on McCarthy's case said to The AP. "She took the ring from the finger that had been severed and continued the attack until she finally killed her."
Reuters reported she was also believed to have murdered two other elderly women in a similar fashion.
"Once the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep hole," said McCarthy's lead trial attorney, Doug Parks to The AP.
Jurors decided that McCarthy should receive the death penalty.
McCarthy has made appeals on the case and three weeks ago the U.S. Supreme Court declined to view her case.
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