Life as a woman on America's death row: 'Worst of both worlds'

The 47 women on death row in the US and thousands of others serving life in prison have had to face treatment that advocates say is often harsher than their male counterpartsShow Caption

As Brenda Andrew sat quietly in an Oklahoma courtroom, a prosecutor held up a pair of her thong underwear for jurors. Would a grieving widow really wear such a sexy undergarment, he asked them?The jurors, who had to decide whether the Sunday school teacher was guilty of being involved in her estranged husband's shooting death, also heard from five witnesses who told them about how Andrew dressed sexy in low-cut shirts and short skirts. They heard about Andrew's sexual history and proclivities, how she liked to skinny-dip in her hot tub and that she was a "hoochie" and a "slut puppy," her attorneys describe in court records.A jury convicted Andrew of first-degree murder and sentenced her to death in 2004. Now more than 20 years later, she remains on Oklahoma's death row.From the time they're arrested to how they're portrayed at trial and later treated in prison, the 47 women on death row in the U.S. and thousands of others serving life sentences face treatment that advocates say is often more unfair and undignified compared to their male counterparts.That includes slut-shaming at trial, fighting for access to menstrual products in prison, enduring the stares of some male guards, and for some of the women serving alone on death row, living in what amounts to solitary confinement with fewer privileges and socialization than male inmates."Female prisoners receive the worst of both worlds,” according to Stephanie Covington, a Southern California-based clinician specializing in trauma-informed responses to violence, and Barbara Bloom, a professor emeritus in criminal justice professor at Sonoma State University in California.And when it comes time for female death row inmates to die, they're frequently held in an all-male prison during their so-called "death watch," a reference to the final days just before their executions during which inmates are closely observed for fear they will die by suicide, said Sandra Lynn Babcock, a law professor at Cornell University who studies gender bias and the death penalty.One female inmate, Christa Pike, is set to have that experience in September, when Tennessee plans to execute her by lethal injection for killing 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer in Knoxville on Jan. 12, 1995 − a murder that made national headlines for its brutality and for both women's young ages. (Pike was 18.) If Pike's execution moves forward despite a botched execution in the state last month, she will be the first woman executed in the state in more than 200 years.Pike's death watch in a male prison "will be carried out by men and then the execution team is going to be comprised primarily of men, who will strap her down and kill her," Babcock said. For a victim of years of sexual abuse like Pike, the experience carries a certain level of torment that men don't necessarily face, she said.With three months to go before Tennessee is set to execute Pike, USA TODAY is looking at the disparate treatment and prison conditions that women like her experience.Prosecutions: From slut-shaming to demonizing lesbiansWhile plenty of men have been subjected to unfair trials, experts say it's different from the scrutiny that women get for things like their looks, promiscuity and sexual orientation.In Brenda Andrew's case in Oklahoma, she was portrayed as "a scarlet woman, a modern Jezebel," wrote 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Robert Bacharach in 2023.Bacharach wrote that prosecutors focused on Andrew's sex life continuously throughout the trial, "sparking distrust based on her loose morals" and "plucking away any realistic chance that the jury would seriously consider her version of events."The U.S. Supreme Court later ruled in Andrew's favor and ordered the lower court to review her claim of an unfair trial, saying that the prosecution later acknowledged that Andrew's sex life and failings as a mother and wife were largely irrelevant to whether she killed her husband. The lower court upheld Andrew's conviction and death sentence earlier this year.While some women's sex lives are put on display during trial, others are demonized for being lesbians and portrayed as having a hatred toward men or being unnatural, experts say. That can be useful because jurors can be more reluctant to sentence a woman harshly, writes Victor Streib, a law professor at Elon University in North Carolina who has researched the treatment of women on death row."An effective means of defeminizing a female capital defendant is to show the jury that she is a lesbian," he wrote. "The more 'manly' her sexuality, her dress, and her demeanor, the more easily the jury may forget that she is a woman."Women on death row also have frequently been let down by male defense attorneys who have failed to tell jurors important mitigating evidence as they consider whether to hand down a death sentence, according to both Babcock and Mary Atwell, a retired professor and author who has extensively studied women on death row.During a defendant's sentencing phase, defense attorneys are duty-bound to present mitigating evidence that could spare their client from a death sentence. That should include any information about trauma in their backgrounds, like severe sexual abuse.In her years of studying women on death row, Atwell said that almost every single one had experienced abuse and neglect as children, poverty, mental illness and subsequently, addictions they formed as a means of escape."There's almost nobody who had a decent defense lawyer presenting these mitigating circumstances," she said. "Prosecutors very often portrayed them as bad mothers or loose women and in some cases, as lesbians or unnatural women − whatever kind of prejudicial things you could tie onto their lives so by the time they got decent representation, it was too late."In Christa Pike's case, for instance, her childhood was marked by years of sexual abuse, multiple rapes, parental neglect, brain damage caused by exposure to alcohol in the womb, and at least one suicide attempt, according to her attorneys. One year before she killed Colleen Slemmer, she had been attacked and raped by the side of a road at the age of 17, they say.But jurors considering Pike's fate never heard about just how traumatic her background was and therefore could not meaningfully weigh whether she might deserve to be spared from the death penalty, they argued. The U.S. Supreme Court has rejected those arguments.Women in prison: Solitary treatment, humiliating searchesAshlee Sellars was just 17 years old when she was arrested and charged with felony murder for a fatal shooting she did not commit. Her accomplice, 18-year-old Daniel Hunley, shot and killed a woman during a robbery in Nashville in 1995. Though Sellars was waiting in a nearby car, she was able to be charged under the so-called felony murder rule, which deems everyone equally culpable if they were involved in a crime that turns fatal.Sellars was released in 2017 at the age of 37 after spending 21 years in prison, an experience that she told USA TODAY was marked entirely by disparate treatment because of her gender. Though she was not serving on death row, her experiences echo that of the women who've been sentenced to death.Sellars said unfair treatment because of her gender began when she was charged with felony murder. Because she was a juvenile at 17, authorities couldn't put her in lock-up with adults but the charge was too serious for her to be housed with other minors. While there were boys her age being housed together for serious crimes, she was the only girl, so she was effectively in solitary confinement for nine months until she turned 18. That meant, she says, that she didn't have the same privileges as the boys − like going outside or getting schooling − simply because the guards apparently forgot about her. They sometimes forgot to feed her, she says.Also at 17, Sellars said she was subjected to mistreatment from a male guard whom she descried as "perverse, inappropriate and aggressive."Once when she talked back to him, she said he pepper-spayed her, shoved her against a wall and told her: "If you want to act like an adult I will (expletive) you like an adult." He and a female guard then stripped her naked and made her shower to remove the pepper spray, she said. She was 17.Other mistreatment ranged from the petty to the embarrassing, said Sellars, who is now 46 and works at the Raphah Institute to help heal young people in the criminal justice system and the people they've harmed.Like other female inmates in Tennessee and beyond, Sellars experienced strip searches that are more humiliating than what men experience because of their menstrual cycles. "They want you to strip naked and you have to remove your tampon and spread your lips so they can make you sure don’t have any contraband inside your vagina," she said.Tampons and pads also are limited in many prisons, and Sellars said some women are left with no choice but to openly bleed.In Sellars' experience, she said women lost privileges often because of a male prisoner's wrongdoing. For instance, when someone at a men's prison used a dumbbell to assault someone, she and the other women at the prison where she was housed lost all their hand weights. For the remainder of her 18 years behind bars, she said she never got to lift weights again while new guards at her facility would tell her that the men were able to use them. The added burden on women who can't lift weights is their unique struggle with osteoporosis.The list goes on, Sellars said: "My dignity and my humanity were stripped from me."Experts interviewed by USA TODAY say that Sellars' experience is not unique to her or to women in Tennessee, but that it is widespread in jails and prisons throughout the nation.More about Christa Pike's life in prisonWhen Christa Pike was sentenced to death 30 years ago, Tennessee had to figure out where to house her as the only woman in the state with a death sentence. She couldn't go to death row because it was all male, so they decided to house her alone. Pike spent 27 years in what her attorneys say amounted to solitary confinement. So unlike her male counterparts on death row, she had no community.They formed a brotherhood, she had only herself. They could go to religious services together, do work, take classes and share meals. She had none of that, her attorneys said.Essentially, Pike was punished more “based on the arbitrary fact that she is the only woman sentenced to death in Tennessee," her attorneys wrote in a 2022 lawsuit against the state."Ms. Pike has been subjected to solitary confinement in a cell the size of a parking space, where she has had nearly no meaningful human contact. These conditions have had a devastating impact on her mental and physical health," they wrote. “The cumulative effect of this extreme punishment ... has deprived Ms. Pike of basic constitutional guarantees of humane treatment."Pike's attorneys and the state reached a settlement that has allowed Pike to interact with other women, work and have more time outside her cell. The privileges are dependent on good behavior.They're criminals. Why care?The average American should care about prison conditions for all inmates, Atwell said, because "when the state prosecutes and punishes an individual, they are doing it in our name.""Prosecutors, judges, corrections officers all are acting for 'the people,'" Atwell said. "They have the authority to carry out the sentence decided upon by the court, but they do not have the authority to inflict pain. The sentence, the deprivation of freedom, is the punishment. It isn't intended to be enhanced by treating the inmate with hostility and cruelty."Any arbitrary additional punishment on top of imprisonment amounts to people in positions of power "exceeding their authority," she said.Babcock said that women on death row "endure torturous and degrading prison conditions that go far beyond what is necessary to maintain a safe environment.""The public cannot see these conditions and cannot experience them, and views those confined in prisons as less than human," she said. "This is why there is no public outcry about the torture that we inflict on incarcerated people, including women."Amanda Lee Myers is a senior crime reporter who covers the death penalty, cold cases and breaking news for USA TODAY. Follow her on X at @amandaleeusat.