Professor studies women on death row
By Mike Wilder / Times-News
February 16, 2008 - 11:26PM
Blanche Taylor Moore will spend her 75th birthday today as one of four women on death row in North Carolina.

That’s a detail Victor Streib knows about the Alamance County woman’s life as part of his interest in women and the death penalty. Four times a year, Streib updates a report with the title “Death Penalty for Female Offenders.”

Streib is a faculty member both at the Elon University School of Law in Greensboro and at Ohio Northern University’s Pettit College of Law. He began teaching at Elon’s law school this semester.

Streib said he’s been researching the death penalty as it applies to women “for about 20 years or so.”

He has worked both as a prosecutor and defense attorney and said he’s represented both women and juvenile offenders as they appealed their death sentences. One of his clients was a 15-year-old girl in Indiana.

Streib said it’s safe to say that, broadly speaking, women are significantly less likely than men to receive the death penalty.

“Women (are charged with) roughly 10 to 12 percent of the murders in the country,” Streib said. “They get about 2 percent of the death sentences and get less than 1 percent of the actual executions.”

The death penalty is not an option in all murder cases, but Streib said it’s possible prosecutors are, on the whole, less likely to seek the death penalty against women.

While court documents from trials and appeals are available for research, he said, it’s not possible to explore what led to a prosecutor’s decision in bringing charges against a defendant or seeking one punishment or another.

For that matter, he said, it’s not possible to know what all the factors were in a jury’s decision in sentencing a defendant.

In an earlier era, Streib said, “sometimes a judge would say from the bench that they’re going to spare somebody’s life because they’re a woman.

“I think that’s what’s happening today,” Streib said. “But we just don’t say it.”

His research has been used as part of briefs by other attorneys in capital punishment cases — for example, by attorneys for male defendants arguing a man is more likely than a woman to receive a death sentence. But as with race, Streib said, courts have said there has to be bias in a particular case, rather than a broad pattern.

Streib said his research has convinced him the death penalty isn’t effective in reducing violent crime. But he doesn’t make a moral argument against the death penalty. Instead, he prefers to present information he’s gathered to help people make up their minds about supporting or opposing capital punishment.

MOORE WAS sentenced to death in January 1991 after a jury convicted her of murdering her boyfriend by arsenic poisoning.

Streib said the length of her time on death row isn’t unheard of.

As the appeals process has gotten longer, he said, “both men and women have gotten old on death row.” He attributes part of the long delays to a court system that isn’t staffed well enough to move cases through more quickly, and suspects in some cases there is no real desire to carry out executions.

That could especially come into play with a woman Moore’s age. A “little old lady” facing execution, he said, would “be an odd situation.”

Among the information in Streib’s report:

* Since the death penalty resumed in the United States in 1973, 162 women have been sentenced to death. Sixteen of those cases have been in North Carolina, placing the state a close third behind California and Texas, each with 18.

* When Velma Barfield was executed in 1984, she was the first woman executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in the 1970s. She is also the last woman to have been executed in North Carolina. (Most who were sentenced to death in the state since the 1970s had their sentences reversed). Barfield’s case and Moore’s had similarities: A jury convicted her of murdering her boyfriend by arsenic poisoning. Barfield later confessed to murdering others, including her mother.

* Since 1973, only 11 of the 1,099 executions in the United States have been of women. Ten of those 11 have been executed since 1998. The most recent execution of a female defendant was in Texas in 2005.

* Among the 51 women on death row in the United States today, four are in North Carolina. Besides Moore, they are Patricia JoAnn Jennings, sentenced in 1990 in the murder of her husband, Carlette Elizabeth Parker, sentenced in 1999 in the murder of an elderly Wake County woman, and Christina Walters, sentenced in 2000 in the murder of two young women.

* Of the 51 women on death row, 12 killed their husbands or boyfriends and 11 killed their children. Two killed both their husbands and their children.

* Three women have been executed in North Carolina since 1900. Besides Barfield’s execution in 1984, the other two executions were in 1943 and 1944. Streib’s research has found executions of women in North Carolina as far back as 1720. Nearly all were of African-American slaves and took place before the Civil War. The youngest was an 18-year-old hanged in 1892.

Streib has been interviewed on violent crime and the death penalty by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and Time magazine. He’s appeared on 60 Minutes, Larry King Live and The Today Show.