Equality Goes All The Way To Death Chamber

The other day a fellow Texan told me that our beloved Lone Star state will soon look bad - ill-bred and backward - if we go ahead with the planned Feb. 3 execution of a woman.

My guess is that the execution of convicted murderer Karla Faye Tucker will only validate views of Texans, not change perceptions.

It’s also my guess that this weathered rancher would not have hesitated to put a few holes in any man who tried to steal one of his horses. But it’s different when it comes to a woman.

We Texans haven’t executed a woman in more than a century. The last woman we executed was Chipita Rodriguez who murdered a horse trader in 1863. Evidently the thought of a woman dangling at the end of a hangman’s noose was enough to put a stop to executions of women in Texas for the past 135 years.

But we execute men left and right in Texas. We executed 37 men by lethal injection just last year. We execute so many men that they will be lucky to get even a squib mention of their passing in the next day’s newspapers.

If the scheduled Feb. 3 execution was of a sadistic, convicted killer named Carl F. Tucker, rather than Karla Faye Tucker, the murderer would never have gained national attention, much less the support of televangelist Pat Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition and a strong advocate of the death penalty.

A confessed killer named Carl F. Tucker would never have caused Gov. George W. Bush to be inundated by clemency pleas, prompt “60 Minutes” to come to Texas for an interview or cause so much discomfort among Texans who don’t give it a second thought when we execute a man.

There is no question about Karla Faye Tucker’s guilt. She not only admitted the murders, she said sinking her pickax into the two victims gave her a sexual charge. She helped her boyfriend slaughter two sleeping people in Houston. She drove her three-foot-long pickax into the beaten male victim to stop his gurgling sounds. She then began sinking her pickax on the female victim and left the instrument buried in the woman’s chest.

Her boyfriend, also sentenced to death, died of liver disease before the state could execute him.

In addition to being a killer, Tucker says she also had been a drug-addicted prostitute. But now she says she has turned her life around, become a Christian, married a prison minister and is a model prisoner.

Her “authentic spiritual conversion” attracted the support of Pat Robertson. Other supporters cite her rehabilitation as reason to have her death sentence commuted.

Claims of rehabilitation and religious conversion by death row prisoners routinely fall on deaf ears in Texas.

The head of the Texas Board of Pardons and Parole has observed that every prisoner who petitions the board claims rehabilitation.

This death row prisoner has attracted nationwide support due solely to her gender, which is the definition of a double standard.

Americans routinely apply a gender-based double standard when it comes to capital punishment.

While one in eight Americans arrested for murder is a woman, only one in 70 death row prisoners is a woman, according to The New York Times.

This unequal treatment is rarely condemned except to say that all capital punishment should be banned, which is another subject entirely.

It’s the same sort of unequal treatment and double standard that is the basis of once-honored chivalry, the reason women and children go first off sinking ships, why women have never faced a military draft or involuntary combat and why there are glass ceilings that impede the upward mobility of women. Evidently, the outrage is optional.

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