Donna Moonda/ Death penalty cases for women

A woman who conspired with her 26-year old lover in the murder of her affluent doctor husband was sentenced to life in prison by an Ohio Northern District Court jury yesterday, in part because the same court had earlier sentenced her accomplice—and the trigger man—to just 17 ½ years in prison. (Article)

The case has drawn quite a bit of attention primarily because federal prosecutors had gone after the death penalty for Moonda, which would’ve made her only the third woman in American history to be executed for a federal crime.
(See Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article)

Nine of the 38 states having the death penalty have never executed a woman.

Ohio, back in June 1954, executed Betty Butler for killing another woman in front of several witnesses but justifying it the other woman had presumably made sexual advances to her. Nicole Ann Diar is on Ohio’s death row now having been sentenced to death for the murder of her 4-year old son in 2003 on November 2, 2005.

Indiana is one of the above-mentioned states to have never executed a woman, although a Debra Denise Brown, who is currently serving a life sentence in Ohio, was sentenced to death in 1986 for the murder of a 7-year old black girl in Gary, Indiana.

Kentucky last executed a woman in 1868. That state now has one woman on death row; Virginia Susan Caudill, who was sentenced in March 2000 for the robbery and murder of a 73-year old woman in Lexington.



Additional information about women who’ve received the death penalty and/or executed:

· “Death Penalty for Female Offenders, Jan. 1973 thru June 2007,” by Victor L. Streib, Ohio Northern University (Last updated July 13, 2007)

· “Women & the Death Penalty,” Death Penalty Information Center