North Carolina has accounted for approximately 10 percent of the death
sentences handed out to American females in the current death penalty
era (1973-present), and the state trails only California and Texas in
the number of female offenders sentenced to death during that same time
period.
These are among the findings of the latest report by Elon University School of Law faculty member Victor Streib,
one of the nation’s leading authorities on the death penalty’s
application to women. He recently published the 62nd issue of his
periodic report titled “Death Penalty for Female Offenders.”
Since the death penalty resumed in the U.S. in 1973, a total of 162
females have been sentenced to death. North Carolina’s total of 16
death sentences of females ranks behind only California and Texas, each
with 18. Among the 51 female offenders still under death sentence
nationally, 4 are in North Carolina, while Texas has 9 and California
has 15.
“North Carolina led the nation in sentencing women to death in the
1970s, but has fallen far back in the pack in the past 15 years,”
Streib said. “The inconsistent pattern of these sentences seems to have
nothing to do with fluctuations in the crime rate for women.”
North Carolina’s 1984 execution of Velma Barfield was the nation’s
first in the current era; 10 others have been executed since then.
Barfield was North Carolina’s third execution of a female since 1900.
Rosana Lightner Phillips was executed in 1943, and Bessie May Williams
was executed in 1944. Streib’s research has documented North Carolina
executions of women as far back as 1720. Almost all were of
African-American slaves and occurred prior to the Civil War. The
youngest was 18-year-old Caroline Shipp, hanged in 1892.
Nationally, Streib says, “women account for 10 percent of the murder
arrests but only 1 percent of the executions in the modern death
penalty era. This extraordinary reluctance to execute women is not
written into our death penalty laws but comes from the heightened value
our judges and juries place on the lives of women.”
