William & Mary Journal of Race, Gender, and Social Justice
Abstract
This Article, for the first time, grapples with the influence of gender on decision makers in women’s capital trials. Part I provides a brief overview of scholarship examining the experiences of women offenders in the criminal legal system. Part II explains how gender inflects the prosecutions of women charged with capital crimes, drawing on scholarly research as well as a data set comprised of the trial transcripts of every woman currently on death row in the United States. Part III explores how the gender of key decision makers could affect the quality of justice received by women capital defendants. I conclude that there is good reason to believe that the overwhelming “maleness” of capital murder prosecutions affects the quality of justice that women receive.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.