Women receive death sentences much less often than men, and the death sentences are carried out less often for women than they are for men.
The following list of quick statistics (quoted from the report at the Death Penalty Information Center, Women and the Death Penalty) gives some indication of the situation:
Women account for (approximately):
The Justice Harry A. Blackmun said, in 1994, that
Twenty years have passed since this Court declared that the death penalty must be imposed fairly, and with reasonable consistency, or not at all, and, despite the effort of the states and courts to devise legal formulas and procedural rules to meet this daunting challenge, the death penalty remains fraught with arbitrariness, discrimination, caprice, and mistake.
In this project, you will examine one aspect of which Justice Blackmun speaks.
Refer to the following sites for more information on gender issues and the death penalty.