In Quest of Gender-Bias in Death Penalty Cases: Analyzing the English Speaking Caribbean Experience

Abstract

For many years I assumed that there was gender-bias with respect to the imposition and carrying out of the death penalty in the United States. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund reports that as of January 1, 1999, there were forty-nine women on death row in the United States. These forty-nine women constitute 1.4% of the total death row population in the United States. The death sentencing rate and the death row population remain very small for women in comparison to that of men. The United States' total death row population is comprised of 3400 individuals, and there are 50,000 women in prison in the United States.However, Elizabeth Rapaport, writing for Law & Society Review, maintains that such results are not evidence of gender-bias at work. Instead, she argues that women are represented on death row in numbers commensurate with the infrequency of female commission of those crimes that our society labels sufficiently reprehensible to merit capital punishment. Ms. Rapaport contends that the death penalty under modem era law is only a dramatic symbol used for those predatory crimes that evoke our society's most extreme condemnation. These predatory crimes are usually committed by men against other men and sometimes by women against those who are not intimates or family members. Women who kill while in the domestic sphere, killing husbands, lovers, or their children, usually kill out of anger, but not for predatory purposes. Statistics reveal that actual execution of female prisoners is quite rare, with only 533 documented instances beginning with the first in 1632. These female executions constitute less than three percent of the nineteen thousand confirmed executions in the United States since 1608. Only four female offenders have been executed since 1976. Death sentences and actual executions for female prisoners are rare in comparison to male offenders. It appears that women are more likely to be dropped out of the system the further the capital punishment system progresses. Again, statistics reveal that although women account for about one in eight of murder arrests (thirteen percent), they account for only one in fifty-three of the death sentences imposed at the trial level, or 1.9% of such sentences imposed.This Article will address the gender-bias question with respect to the female death penalty debate in Trinidad and Tobago, with special emphasis on the case of Indrawani Pamela Ramjattan. The Privy Council recently remanded her case to the Trinidad Court of Appeal. A decision in her favor may set a regional precedent which will, for the first time, allow women in the ESC to present defense evidence akin to Battered Spouse Syndrome. A review of the female death penalty debate in the ESC may encourage reflection on whether there should be gender limitations placed on the imposition of the use of the death penalty in the United States and other nations.