Women and Capital Punishment in the United States by David V. Baker

Author:David V. Baker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2015-12-29T16:00:00+00:00

At trial, McCarter testified against Louise in exchange for a life prison term without parole. The jury found Louise guilty and recommended to the court to sentence her to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. At her sentencing hearing, however, Montgomery Circuit Court Judge H. Randall Thomas overrode the jury’s recommendation and sentenced Louise to death by electrocution finding that the aggravating circumstances outweighed the mitigating circumstances. In Harris v. Alabama in 1995, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld judicial override in capital cases. Juries sentenced Sockwell to life in prison but the trial judge rejected the jury recommendation and sentenced him to death as well. Sockwell remains on Alabama’s death row while undergoing appeals of his death sentence.

The Supreme Court of Alabama and the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama both affirmed Harris’ conviction and death sentence. In a dissenting opinion in the case, one justice of the state’s Supreme Court found that the court should grant Louise a new trial because the prosecutor in the case violated Louise’s constitutional rights under Batson during the jury selection process when “she [the prosecutor] challenged 71 percent of the black venire members but only 21 percent of the white venire members.” What’s more, Justice Adams argued, the Court of Criminal Appeals has observed that the prosecutor “has a history of using peremptory challenges to discriminate against black jurors.” In 2004, the Court of Criminal Appeals of Alabama reversed the death sentence and remanded the case to the circuit court for a new penalty-phase hearing finding that Louise had ineffective assistance of counsel during the guilt phase of her trial. The trial court resentenced Louise to life in prison without parole and she is presently housed at the Tutwiler Prison for Women.

Modernly, Arkansas appeals courts have commuted the death sentence of only one female death row defendant. In March 1984, a Clark County jury found Patricia Hendrickson guilty of the 1983 capital murder of her husband, Orin Hendrickson, for financial gain of over $600,000 and the trial court sentenced her to death. Patricia conspired with Norma Foster, a college dormitory housemother at Ouachita Baptist University, and Mark Yarbrough, a student at the same university, to hire Howard Daniel Vagi, another student at the university, to kill her husband for $16,000. Patricia gave Vagi a picture of her husband, supplied him with a key to the Hendrickson house, showed him the house, and gave him a down payment of $5,000. Yagi bought a shotgun and on the afternoon of the murder went to the Hendrickson’s house. He waited for Orin to come home later in the evening and then shot him twice in the chest. Vagi ransacked the house to make the killing appear to be part of a robbery. Patricia and Norma found Orin’s body when they went to the house and notified police. About eight months after Orin’s murder, police arrested all the principals in the killing. At trial, evidence showed that Patricia was intellectually and emotionally incapable of contriving the murder, and that her low I.

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