At 6 p.m. this evening, the state of Texas is set to execute Kimberly McCarthy, 51, the first woman to be put to death in the U.S. since 2010.
McCarthy, an African-American woman, was found guilty in 1997 of brutally killing her 71-year-old neighbor and using a butcher knife to chop off her finger to steal her ring. All of McCarthy’s last-minute appeals have been rejected.
The U.S. Supreme Court three weeks ago declined to review her case, while the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles last week turned down a clemency petition, and Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins has not responded to her lawyers’ requests for a delay. Her lawyers went to Watkins because he has expressed an interest in adopting a law in Texas to allow death-row prisoners to base appeals on race.
After McCarthy was convicted by a Dallas County jury, during the punishment phase of her case it came to light that she had been indicted but never convicted in the murders of two elderly women in Dallas in 1988.
There was DNA and fingerprint evidence tying her to the brutal slayings — the beating with a meat tenderizer and stabbing of 81-year-old Maggie Harding and the beating with a claw hammer and stabbing of 85-year-old Jettie Lucas — but the indictments against her were dropped. Her case drew considerable attention because McCarthy was a former nursing home therapist who worked with the elderly.
“Once the jury heard about those other two, we were certainly in a deep hole,” McCarthy’s lead trial attorney, Doug Parks, said.
In 2010 a Virginia inmate, Teresa Lewis, was the 12th woman executed in the U.S. since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that capital punishment could resume. During those 36 years, 1,309 men have been executed — 492 of them in Texas, which executes far more people than any other state.
According to figures compiled by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as of last October there were 3,146 people were on the nation’s death rows , and only 63 — 2 percent — were women.
In the case of McCarthy, all but one of the jurors were white.
“It certainly doesn’t make me happy,” her lawyer, Parks, told The Associated Press of the coming execution. “It’s a fact of life. … The reality is, with some exceptions, they’re going to execute your client.”
According to the evidence presented in her case, McCarthy phoned her neighbor Dorothy Booth to borrow a cup of sugar, then attacked the retired college professor when she went to retrieve it. Booth was stabbed with a butcher knife, beaten with a large candle holder and robbed of a diamond wedding ring.
“(McCarthy) quite literally took the woman, put her left hand on a chopping block of the kitchen and then used a knife to sever her ring finger while she was still alive,” said Greg Davis, the former Dallas County assistant district attorney who prosecuted McCarthy. “She took the ring from the finger that had been severed and continued the attack until she finally killed her.”
Then McCarthy stole Booth’s Mercedes and drove to Dallas, where she pawned the ring for $200 and went to a crack house to buy some cocaine, according to prosecutors. She used Booth’s credit cards at a liquor store and was carrying Booth’s driver’s license.
“There’s a good chance that she would not be sentenced to death if tried now,” Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told AFP news agency. “A case like this involving apparent drug addiction and other mitigating factors might well have been settled without the death penalty.”
