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Gender Stereotypes Affecting African American Women On Death Row

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In America, there is a constant debate on race and the death row. Questions about either African American are sentenced and executed more than a white man. But what most people don’t think about is gender and the death row. That is because women are very rarely sentenced to death and even fewer women actual put to death, Women accounted for only 1.4% of the 2,890 persons under sentences of death in 1994. And the numbers have not changed much. As if October 1, 2014 there were only fifty- seven women on death row (Strieb, 2006). But as we know any race or gender can commit a crime that can land them on death row, so why are women not sentence to death as much as men. The main reason is sexual bias, which is simply that women are not only not …show more content…

Money is one of the main motivators for murder. When money is a factor, men usually kill someone in a robbery gone badly. Women however usually think more long term, they will take an insurance policy out on their husbands, children, and other family members and then kill them. These women are usually called black widows, named after the spiders that eat the male spiders after they have engaged in sex. Two of the women that have been executed since 1976 have been described as black widows, even though money was the motive for more than two of those women. But the reason Betty Lou Beets and Judy Buenoano are described as black widows is because of the number of victims and the number of years the killed. Betty Lou Beets murdered her fifth husband, was charged with killing her fourth, and shooting her second husband. After the discovery of her fifth and fourth husbands murders police went looking for her two others, they found them buried under her mobile home. Judy Buenoano was described as a black widow after she killed her veteran husband with arsenic, drowned her paralyzed son, and attempted to kill her fiancé with a firebomb. She collected more than 250,000 for her crimes. Now if those two black widows had not been female than most likely there victim count would be lower. Police might have taken the fact family members had not seen Betty Lou’s husbands. But the Chivalry effect often makes male police officers not even think that the sweet lady could kill her husbands. Know if Betty Lou had only killed her fifth husbands than there was a chance she could have received a lighter sentence. Betty Lou claimed that he beat her, but since she killed four out of her five, not for lack of trying to make it five out of five, she received the death

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Imagine having the feelings of your former significant other be the reason you live or die. The thought of that is mind boggling and you would stop at nothing to not let it happen. The murder of female victims is most often perpetrated within the framework of an intimate relationship. Usually, homicides against women are carried out by their male partners, at what turns out to be the end of a trajectory of escalating abuse of dominance. That’s what happened to Hae Min Lee, she was murdered by Adnan Syed out of his jealousy over his ex-girlfriend’s relationship with her co-worker.

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Women of color are the most targeted, prosecuted, and imprisoned women in the country and rapidly increasing their population within the prison systems. According to Nicholas Freudenberg, 11 out of every 1000 women will end up incarcerated in their lifetime, the average age being 35, while only five of them are white, 15 are Latinas, and 36 are black. These two groups alone make up 70 percent of women in prison, an astonishing rate compared to the low percentage comprise of within the entire female population in the country (1895). Most of their offenses are non-violent, but drug related, and often these women come from oppressive and violent backgrounds, where many of their struggles occurred directly within the home and from their own family.

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The “death penalty is a lethal lottery: just one out of every one hundred people arrested for murder is actually executed”. Only thirty-one out of more than fifteen thousand recorded executions in the United States have been of white suspects convicted of killing black victims, while black suspects convicted of raping white women were commonly sentenced to death (Amnesty International). Another response to the fact that innocent people have been executed is, that the small number of innocents executed outweighs the number of lives that will be saved since the possibility of being executed will discourage others from committing murder, and also lives will be saved since that murderer can-not kill again. Career criminals and those that plan a crime do not expect to get caught, thus making the consequences an invalid issue. In response to the fact that an executed murderer will never kill again, society must ask itself whether it is honorably and properly acceptable to risk killing an innocent person when an alternative such as life imprisonment without possibility of parole

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Social perceptions envision that women are less dangerous than men, they are less likely to recommit the same crime and are more susceptible to constrain upon their release (Shatz & Shatz, 2012). In addition, gender stereotyping has led to the assumption that the average male is more susceptible to loss of self-control specifically one that includes violence than the average women. In fact, this may due to the criminal’s own socialization since they act differently when they are provoked (Shatz & Shatz, 2012). Through the longitudinal study of federal prison sentences, Doerner & Demuth (2014) demonstrate the injustices that most men face when entering the justice system due to the fact that they have been socialized as the male gender. Comparatively, since women are mostly associated with a maternal image or housewife, those who have children or those who are married receive greater leniency than males (Doemer & Demuth, 2014).

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