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Why are so few women sentenced to death?

Tiffany Moss will be the only woman on Georgia's death row

ATLANTA — ATLANTA – A Gwinnett County jury’s decision to sentence Tiffany Moss to death is a rare move in Georgia and across the country.

Women make up less than 2% of all criminals sentenced to death in our country.

Why?

In most cases, the death penalty is reserved for crimes involving aggravating circumstances.

“Statistically, women commit fewer capital offenses, and an even smaller percentage of those cases have statutory aggravating circumstances that would allow for pursuance of the death penalty,” says Carla Rieffel Bozeman of the Prosecuting Attorneys’ Council of Georgia.

Aggravating circumstances in a murder case would include a killing that involved torture, rape, robbery, or other similar crimes.

“You almost never see a torture murder committed by a woman,” says Gwinnett County District Attorney Danny Porter, who prosecuted the Tiffany Moss case.

Kelly Gissandaner is one of only two women executed in Georgia. She planned the death of her husband and convinced her boyfriend to do the killing. Georgia law states that if a person “caused or directed another person to commit murder,” the case meets the standards for seeking the death penalty.

Dr. Mary Atwell has studied the issue and believes the death penalty is reserved for those who stray far from society’s expectations for women.

“Most of the women who have been sentenced to death fall into a couple of categories,” says Atwell. “Prosecutors in these cases were successful in portraying the accused as promiscuous, bad mothers, greedy types who did not at all conform to the social expectations for women. In other words, their failure to conform to gendered expectations was treated as an aggravating circumstance, making them look more evil in the eyes of the jury.”

A 2011 study by the University of San Francisco School of Law concluded chivalry plays a role.

“The simple explanation is that women are sentenced to death at a lower rate than men because of chivalric attitudes on the part of prosecutors and juries,” says the report by Steven and Naomi Shatz of the U.S.F. School of Law. “Because women are stereotyped as weak, passive, and in need of male protection, prosecutors and juries seem reluctant to impose the death penalty upon them.”

Their report says women who kill are generally seen as less dangerous than men who commit similar crimes.

 

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