In the past, Georgia would have let Kelly Renee Gissendaner live

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/02/georgia-kelly-renee-gissendaner

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For death penalty watchers, all eyes will be on Georgia today - much as they have been throughout the grim history of the American death penalty - as the state plans to execute 46-year-old Kelly Renee Gissendaner. Georgia is the state where the Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia created a de facto moratorium to the death penalty in 1972, and also where Gregg v Georgia brought the death penalty back to life in 1976.

Gissendaner’s clemency appeal was rejected last week, despite “detailed testimony from inmates and former wardens” on her behalf. Her last petition to the Supreme Court was denied in October. According to the NAACP, she stands to be the 15th woman put to death by the government since 1976.

In the same period, 1,368 men have been executed. While men commit far more violent crimes than women, there is a disquieting history of racial and gender dynamics to who is sentenced to the death penalty after being convicted for the same crimes. This disparate impact was at issue in Furman v. Georgia. In his majority opinion, Justice Thurgood Marshall made note of:

overwhelming evidence that the death penalty is employed against men and not women. Only 32 women have been executed since 1930, while 3,827 men have met a similar fate. It is difficult to understand why women have received such favored treatment since the purposes allegedly served by capital punishment seemingly are applicable to both sexes.

That purpose, ostensibly though easily refutable, is that the death penalty should prevent crime. But if that were the case, following the death penalty’s lopsided application towards men, it would mean men would be deterred from committing about 85 percent of all homicides and women would be running rampant.

The five member majority of Furman ruled effectively, if temporarily, to end capital punishment because of “the discretion of judges and juries in imposing the death penalty” which enable it “to be selectively applied, feeding prejudices against the accused if he is poor and despised, and lacking political clout.”

Though the Furman case was argued mostly around William Henry Furman’s inability to get a fair capital trial as a poor black man, Marshall noted the disparate impact of the death penalty on men, and the court ruled that “In a Nation committed to equal protection of the laws there is no permissible ‘caste’ aspect of law enforcement.”

The disparate impact of the Furman case did not only stop executions of blacks and the poor in Georgia; it ended them for all Americans.

That was, until Utah upstaged Georgia with the first post-Gregg execution in 1977, of Gary Gilmore by firing squad. Indeed, Utah may again upstage Georgia’s execution news, as its house of representatives just voted to resurrect firing squads.

Much has been made of Gissendaner’s conversion to Christianity and her relationship with prominent German theologian Jürgen Moltmann. But it’s worth noting Gissendaner’s rare execution as a woman. That women are far less likely to face execution than men does not demonstrate a “men’s rights” defense of male murders; but the aberration does highlight an unjustly applied law which should be tossed out for everyone.

We know that men, the mentally ill, and the poor are more likely to wind up on death row. A 2011 Stanford Law School report found that, “Minority defendants who murder white victims are three times as likely to receive a death sentence as white defendants who murder white victims.” For the state and its agents who literally execute its death penalty, the convicted must be considered a monster. It is arguably harder to flip the switch on the electric chair when that “monster” is gendered female. And, though it’s hard to say with such a small sample, it seems harder to see a woman enough as a monster to actually kill her - that is, unless she is lesbian, black, poor or all three.

The answer, of course, is not to execute more people. The answer is that the state of Georgia - and all states, and the federal US government - should stop executing everyone, for it is a legal, financial and moral failure that does not deter the crimes it professes to. While not technically a crime in America, the death penalty is a mortal injustice - and one that must be stopped.

Updated on 3 March 2014: Gissendaner’s execution was temporarily halted last night because the lethal injection drug appeared “cloudy”.