Don't miss the spring issue of MS Magazine with its special report on women and the death penalty by Claudia Driefus. It's available free, on-line.

Since 1976 when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 131 women have been sentenced to death. Ten women have been executed, nine of them within the past five years.

As this is being written, there are 44 women sitting on death rows in some 14 states, less than 2% of the total among the condemned. In the 27 years since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment, ten women have been put to death. As the nation continues to debate the use of executions as a crime prevention strategy, the fate of these women is mostly absent from public discussion. They are a policy afterthought, as invisible in their potential deaths as they were in their lives.

The broad arguments against capital punishment, male and female, are widely known: It is applied unequally to the poor and unequally by race; innocent people have likely been executed; it does nothing to deter crime; it brutalizes all of society by heightening the general ambiance of violence. But when one examines the stories of the women on death rows around the country, all the rest seems doubly true. The females who draw death sentences seem to be the poorest of the poor, the most socially marginal, the least able to protect themselves in court with a well-funded and coherent defense.