A US woman has been put to death by lethal injection in Virginia, the first woman executed in the state for nearly a century, prompting outrage from anti-death penalty campaigners.
Teresa Lewis, 41, convicted of masterminding the murders of her husband and stepson, was pronounced dead at 9.13 p.m. on Thursday (0113 GMT yesterday) at Greensville prison, prison official Larry Taylor said.
Death penalty abolitionists had championed Ms Lewis’s case, insisting she had diminished mental faculties and that smarter accomplices had taken advantage of her.
“This execution means that the system is broken,” Ms Lewis’s lawyer James Rocap said after the execution.
Jack Payden-Travers of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty described the execution as “legal homicide. Nothing more than a legal lynching.”
Ms Lewis, who had an IQ of about 70, “was calm, she seemed very resolute” as she walked into the death room, Mr Taylor said. The press pool, however, said “she looked scared, nervous”.
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday turned down Ms Lewis’s appeal for a stay of execution and Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, as he had previously signalled, did not intervene in the case.
Outside the prison, a group of about 30 opponents of the death penalty rang a bell and prayed as Ms Lewis went to her death.
“What kind of people are we to execute someone like her?” cried campaigner Virginia Rovnyak.
“She didn’t pull the trigger, and she was mentally challenged,” she insisted.
Ms Lewis is the first female prisoner executed in the southern state since 1912, when a 17-year-old black woman name Virginia Christian was sent to the electric chair.
She is only the 12th woman executed in the US since the death penalty was resumed in 1976.
Despite her low IQ, Ms Lewis was ruled fit for trial in Virginia. She pleaded guilty to hiring two men in 2002 to murder her husband and stepson so she could pocket their life insurance policy.
Ms Lewis admitted she left open the door of the family trailer in rural Pittsylvania County so her two young accomplices could enter and shoot her husband and his 25-year-old son. All three pleaded guilty. The shooters got life in prison, but Ms Lewis was sentenced to death, accused of being the mastermind of the killings.
Ms Lewis’s supporters question why she was sentenced to death when the two men who actually carried out the murder were handed life without parole.
This “is as good an example as you can find of someone who should not be put to death,” Dr Rocap told the National Law Journal before the execution.
“Teresa Lewis is a poster child for why the death penalty process is broken.”
The criminal justice system is “so badly broken, it cannot be saved from my view,” Dr Rocap said.