Supreme Court Decision on Prosecutor Sexism Could Give Women New Trials

Article here. Excerpt:

'In January, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a federal court to consider whether an Oklahoma woman named Brenda Andrew should get a new trial. In 2004, an Oklahoma jury convicted Andrew and sentenced her to die for the killing of her husband three years earlier. She is now the only woman on the state’s death row.

However, Andrew has long asserted that prosecutors tainted her case with irrelevant testimony regarding her sex life, mothering skills, and clothing. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court agreed. With this landmark 7–2 ruling, the nation’s highest court recognized that harmful gender stereotypes can poison women’s criminal trials.

As the co-founder of the Center on Gender and Extreme Sentencing and faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, I led a team of researchers that reviewed the cases of nearly fifty women on death rows around the country for evidence of gender bias. We found that juries were allowed to consider women’s sexual histories, failings as mothers, choices of intimate partners, and female “wickedness” when deciding how to punish them.'