First woman executed in US in five years

The state of Virginia has put to death by lethal injection 41-year-old Teresa Lewis, the first execution of a woman in the United States since 2005, and only the 12th since capital punishment resumed in 1976.

The execution took place at approximately 1pm today NZ time (9pm Thursday local time), the Washington Post reported.

Lewis was put to death for hiring two men to kill her husband and stepson in October 2002 in a plot to collect US$250,000 ($340,000) of life insurance.

On Wednesday, Governor Robert McDonnell again refused to commute her sentence. He said he could find "no compelling reason" for clemency.

Lewis admits committing the crimes, and seems resigned to her fate.

"It hurts deeply in my heart to know that I took two people's lives that I loved, and hurt so many others that I love and care about," she told the Richmond Times-Dispatch on Wednesday.

Although she did not herself commit the murders, the judge who sentenced her in 2003 described her as "the head of this snake".

Lewis, it was established, was having an affair and devised a scheme with her lover, Matthew Shallenberger, whereby she would leave the door of her trailer home open so that Shallenberger and an accomplice could slip in and kill her husband and stepson as they slept.

Initially she claimed that intruders were responsible, but quickly confessed what really happened.

But the case, it gradually emerged, was not that simple. Lewis was a gullible woman, of very low intelligence. Shallenberger - a petty criminal with ambitions of being a professional hit-man - boasted that he was the real mastermind of the murder plot. In 2004 Rodney Fuller, the accomplice, signed an affidavit declaring that "Shallenberger was definitely the one in charge of things, not Ms Lewis".

Shallenberger and Rodney pleaded guilty in return for life imprisonment, while Lewis, borderline mentally retarded and with no previous record of violence, was sentenced to death. For supporters of Lewis and opponents of the death penalty, the different treatment underlines the random and unfair way in which capital punishment is applied in the US.

Another critic is the Virginia crime novelist and former trial lawyer John Grisham, who wrote in the Washington Post that Lewis' punishment had less to do with fairness than "the assignment of judge and prosecutor, the location of the crime, the quality of the defence counsel, the speed with which a co-defendant struck a deal, the quality of each side's experts and other factors". Such inconsistencies, he insisted, "mock the idea" that the US system is based on equality before the law.

The affair has also given Iran an opportunity to berate the US for hypocrisy in preparing to put Lewis to death, while Washington condemned Tehran for sentencing Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani to death by stoning.

It now appears Ashtiani will no longer be stoned. But the cases do have similarities. Ashtiani, 43, is accused of plotting to kill her former husband, as well as adultery.

This week, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the Iranian President who is in New York for UN meetings, said "a woman is being executed in the US for murder, but no one is protesting against it".

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

3261 People on death row in US at start of 2010.
61 Women on death row in the US at the start of 2010 - less than 2 per cent of death row population.
107 Executions carried out by the state of Virginia in the past 34 years. Only Texas has executed more, with 463.
11 Women executed in the US since the restoration of the death penalty in 1976.
35 Number of states with the death penalty. Fifteen states do not have the ultimate sanction.
18 Countries known to have carried out death sentences in 2009.
1982 Year when lethal injection was introduced in US. More than 1000 prisoners have been executed by this method.

- INDEPENDENT, NZ HERALD STAFF