Capital Jurors’ Receptivity to Mental Mitigation for Female Defendants with Non-Stereotypic Gender Behavior (Kentucky, Missouri)

• In Event: Capital Punishment: Opinion, Politics, and Juries

Abstract

The study analyzes the receptivity of capital jurors to mental health mitigation in the trials of three female defendants in Kentucky and Missouri. In jury literature, female capital defendants were treated more sympathetically if they displayed female cultural stereotypes, and were more culpable if they presented aggressive non-stereotypic gendered behavior; “unemotional and hard-driving” (Streib; White). The study compares capital trial transcript data with open-ended CJP-1 1990’s juror interviews. The Kentucky multiple-murder case involved two gay female co-defendants, with differing psychological conditions. Jurors perceived A (death) as aggressive, threatening and cold, but they perceived B (life) to be the less culpable battered partner, acting under duress from her accomplice. Jurors were unreceptive to A’s borderline personality disorder, sexual abuse and cocaine dependence. “Lots of people grow up under terrible circumstances, but they don’t go out and kill people.” “A was the more aggressive of the two women.” In the Missouri death case, jurors identified defendant’s coldness, lack of remorse, dismemberment of the victim, and non-maternal instincts with premeditated intentional murder. “If any woman could try to pin it on her own son, it makes it more believable that she’s capable of first degree premeditated murder. I mean that’s cold.”

Author

• Leona Deborah Jochnowitz, Hartwick College