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Show Study of women shows... wi2 lo st ls collecting information on women who have been executed, that he said will reveal interesting things about females in American and about the justice system. IT'S ALL part of a first-of-a-kind study that o iTu 2 Glll"Pie. a professor of sociology at Weber State College, is researching. One grandmother hired two ex-cons to strangle! 'her daughter-in-law, one lady poisoned four with arsenic and was suspected ot doing the same to two others, one woman axed her landlord and one used a shotgun on a waiter. GILLESPIE said, "It may be a morbid topic, some people put us in the same category as ghouls, but lots of good information will come from it. The search focuses on females that have been legally executed in the United States and he s gathering the never-before compiled facts m hopes that what he finds will give a deeper understanding of the criminal justice system and how it handles female criminals. GILLESPIE said, "What's the difference when one woman is sentenced to death and others who have committed essentially the same crime are not. The answers to those kinds of questions will give great insight into the justice jus-tice system." Gillespie said that Barbara Lopez, a junior at Weber State, first had the idea when she wondered won-dered whether the women's liberation movement move-ment had resulted in more executions of women. That curiosity led to a dead end as she found no available facts. SHE APPROACHED Gillespie with the idea and the two started an extensive search that the professor said will take three to five years to complete and will probably result in a new book. Gillespie, who has studied criminology and the death penalty for many years and who served full-time on the State Board of Pardons, said, "Everyday there's a new piece to the puzzle. It never gets boring." SO FAR the two have collected data on 123 women that have been executed. Most of them have been older, most are either nurses or waitresses wait-resses and the earliest ones so far are two who were executed in the 1600 s on Pilgrim's ships that were sailing for America. In both cases a storm at sea didn't let up for a number of days so witchcraft was suspected, and the two elderly elder-ly ladies were hanged. One execution occurred on a shop where John Green was the master, and was objected to by John Washington, the great-grandfather of George Washington. "Over all, most of the executions have been 1 1 i by hanging," Gillespie said. "But since 1930 most have been by electrocution." LOPEZ SAID that the data is gathered from historical societies, newspapers, archives, and from university and college libraries across the nation. "It's kind of like putting a detective story together," she said. Gillespie's office is drifted over with piles of information and each woman discovered has her own file that includes her crime, how she was killed, last meal, last words and any other fact the two researchers can find. GILLESPIE said that so far it seems that women who cry at the trial have a better change of "getting away with murder" and avoiding the death penalty. The dry-eyed ones tend to receive the death sentence. "Also, for the killing of a family member where there was no profit motive the woman is not really risking the death penalty," Lopez added. THERE HAVE only been 33 executions of females since 1930 even though hundreds have, committed murder, Lopez said. During that same time over 3.000 men have been executed. Women have chopped up other women and avoided the death penalty, some have hired killers to do their husbands in, and others have just plain shot them and have not been sentenced sent-enced to death. GILLESPIE said, "Women tend to avoid the death penalty, and if they do get the death penalty they avoid execution much more than men." He added, "We find that the patterns are different and that the use of the death penalty has not so much to do with the crime as with the political feelings at the time." GILLESPIE said that except for three federal feder-al executions, one for syping, one for kidnapping kidnap-ping and one in connection with the assassination assassina-tion of Abraham Lincoln, all legal killings of women have been by the states. Lopez said, "The south has had the most executions, including women, and the northwest north-west has had the least." Utah has never executed ex-ecuted a woman, she noted. CONTRARY to common belief, Gillespie said that more females have been legally killed during the 20th century than during the witch hunt days of the 1600 and I700's and pregnant women have also been killed. Lopez said the process of discovering the historical executions poses many problems, but as people have found out about the research re-search they have phoned or sent documents, newspaper clippings and anecdotal material. |
