July 25, 2010
The Death Penalty is a Woman's Issue Too
The anti-death penalty movement in California is expanding and gaining momentum. Our core base of activists—people concerned about the inequities of the criminal justice system and people of faith—are finding coalition with activists from other movements, movements whose core issue is not ending the death penalty. Young people are angered that California spends billions on the death penalty while slashing Cal Grants and raising tuition. The LGBTQ community fought against the inclusion of a death penalty provision in the Mathew Shepard Hate Crimes Legislation and are fighting horrific bills in Uganda that would impose the death penalty for being gay. Civil rights groups are demanding that we implement protections to ensure that race is not a factor in who gets sentenced to death.
Most recently, California NOW—the largest state based feminist organization in the US—joined the fight against new execution regulations in California. California NOW objected to the regulations based on the unfair and unequal treatment of women on death row, and encouraged their members to voice their opposition as well. Some might be surprised that a group focused on women’s issues would take a stand against the death penalty. But the death penalty is a woman’s issue too.
The history of the death penalty in the United States is deeply tied to both racial and gender discrimination. During slavery and the Jim Crow area, the death penalty was routinely applied to African American men for what was deemed inappropriate contact with white women (both legally through the criminal justice system and extra-legally through lynching). This use of the death penalty served not only to reinforce racial barriers but gender barriers as well: the legal system viewed white women as the property of white men, requiring a heightened level of legal protection to maintain their “purity” and “value.” Over time, the laws became race neutral in theory though not in practice, even while they remained explicitly gender biased until recently.
By the mid-1970s, most states had restricted use of the death penalty to cases involving murder or rape of a woman. In 1977, the US Supreme Court considered whether the death penalty was a disproportionate punishment for the crime of rape of an adult woman. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the founder and then director of the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, authored an amicus brief explaining that the punishment of death for rape of an adult woman was a vestige of a misogynist legal system that viewed women as more vulnerable than men and, indeed, as the property of men.
Today, the death penalty system in California is gender and race neutral on paper, but not in practice. Sadly, the primary role women continue to play in death penalty cases is as victims. One unpublished study found that, in one California county, crimes in which the victim was a woman were 17 times more likely to end in a death sentence. Professor Steve Shatz at University of San Francisco School of Law has extensively studied use of the death penalty in Alameda County specifically. He has found that in Alameda County, cases in which the victim is a woman are three times more likely to end in a death sentence.
Underlying these numbers is the same misogynist view of women: that we are more vulnerable and in need of more protection than men. Indeed, it is not unusual for advocates of the death penalty to specifically state that executions are needed to “protect our women and children.” Implicitly in that rhetoric is the view that women are children, not equal and empowered actors like adult men.
A legal system that is gender neutral and free of the vestiges of misogyny must be a legal system that respects the human rights of all individuals. It must be a legal system that does not include the death penalty. With a multitude of voices from a myriad of organizations joining the movement to end the death penalty, we are getting closer to the day when that dream will be a reality.
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