Beyond Mercy

Women, the Death Penalty and a Story We’re Just Starting to Tell

We talk about capital punishment as if it has always been a man’s story. The numbers suggest otherwise — but only if you know where to look.

In 1632, Jane Champion became the first woman executed in the new colonies. She wasn’t a witch. She wasn’t a murderer. History barely recorded why. And in many ways that erasure set the tone for everything that followed.

Between 1692 and 1693 the Salem Witch Trials consumed colonial Massachusetts. Of the 21 people executed for witchcraft, 14 were women.

Then came Mary Surratt, who in July 1865 became the first woman executed by the United States federal government — hanged for her alleged role in the Lincoln assassination conspiracy while five of her nine judges quietly petitioned for mercy based on her sex and age. The petition was ignored.

Women have been here from the very beginning of this American experiment with state-sanctioned death. We just don’t talk about it that way.

The Numbers Tell a Strange Story

Since 1632, only 576 documented executions of women have occurred in the United States — roughly 3.6% of the more than 16,000 confirmed executions on record. Since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, only 18 women have been executed.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, as of October 7, 2025, there were 47 women currently awaiting execution across the United States. Women represent just 2% of death-sentenced prisoners in a system that holds roughly 2,100 people on death row.

Two percent. In a country where women commit a meaningful percentage of violent crime, they account for a fraction of a fraction of those we choose to execute.

That gap isn’t justice. It isn’t mercy either. It’s something more complicated — and more troubling.

The question isn’t simply why so few women face the ultimate punishment. It’s who among that small group actually does, and what those decisions reveal about how the system sees women, race, trauma, and culpability when they all arrive in the same courtroom.

The Role of Race and Trauma

The numbers alone don’t tell you who ends up in that 2%. Race does.

Women of color are disproportionately represented among those sentenced to death — a reflection of the same systemic racial bias that shapes outcomes at every other level of the criminal legal system. The death penalty has never operated in a vacuum and it doesn’t start being racially neutral when the defendant is a woman.

Trauma is the other thread the system consistently drops. Many women on death row carry histories of gender-based violence — domestic abuse, sexual assault, exploitation — that shaped the circumstances of their crimes in ways courts have been slow to reckon with. The law requires mitigation in capital cases. Requiring it and actually weighing it are two different things.

Their histories are not incidental to their crimes. For many of them their histories are their crimes — just told by someone else.

What Faith Has to Say

The tradition I come from has a lot to say about mercy. About the image of God present in every human being. About what it means to stand before judgment and find grace on the other side. But the church has been largely silent on what happens when the state decides that mercy has limits — that some women have placed themselves beyond its reach. That silence is its own kind of answer. If we believe that every life carries inherent dignity, we cannot selectively apply that belief at the courthouse door. The women on death row are not abstractions. They are image bearers whose stories the system has decided to end. That deserves more than our silence.

This post is just the door. In May I’m going deep — a series examining women and the death penalty through history, data, race, and the cases that changed the conversation. Stay with me.