CNN
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Missouri became the first U.S. state to openly execute a transgender person on Tuesday when Amber McLaughlin, convicted of the 2003 murder and unsuccessfully seeking a pardon from the governor, was put to death by lethal injection. Did.
“McLaughlin was pronounced dead at 6:51 p.m.,” the Missouri Department of Corrections said in a statement.
McLaughlin’s execution is unusual as it is the first in the United States this year. Executions of women in the United States are already rare. Before McLaughlin’s execution, only 17 people had been sentenced to death since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty after a short reprieve, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. The nonprofit has confirmed that McLaughlin is the first openly transgender person to be executed in the United States.
McLaughlin, 49, and her lawyers petitioned Republican Governor Mike Parson for a pardon and asked her death sentence to be commuted. It shows genuine remorse, they say, and has suffered from a history of intellectual disability, mental health problems, and childhood trauma.
However, in a statement Tuesday, Parson’s office said the execution would go ahead as planned. Her victim Beverly Gunther’s family and her loved ones “deserve peace,” the statement said.
“Missouri will enforce McLaughlin’s verdict in accordance with the court’s order and achieve justice,” Person said.
McLaughlin – listed as Scott McLaughlin in court documents – had not initiated a legal name change or transition and was being held at the Potosi Correctional Center near St. Louis as a person sentenced to death. Governor’s office announced.
According to court records, McLaughlin was sentenced to death in November 2003 for the murder of Gunther.
Although the two had previously been in a relationship, they were separated by the time of the murder, and Gunther had been served with a protective order after McLaughlin was arrested for breaking into Gunther’s home.
Weeks later, McLaughlin waited for Gunther outside the victim’s workplace while the order took effect, court records say. McLaughlin repeatedly stabbed and raped Gunther, prosecutors alleged at trial, pointing to blood splatters in the parking lot and Gunther’s truck.
According to court records, a jury convicted McLaughlin of first-degree murder, forced rape, and an armed crime.
But when it came to the verdict, the jury stalled.
Most US states with the death penalty require a unanimous jury to recommend or impose the death penalty, but Missouri does not. According to state law, if the jury cannot agree on the death penalty, the judge will decide either life imprisonment without parole or the death penalty. A McLaughlin judge sentenced him to death.
McLaughlin’s lawyers argued that he would not have overturned the jury’s will, since the jury could not agree to the death sentence even if Parson had granted a pardon.
But according to a petition filed with the governor, that was just one of several reasons McLaughlin’s attorney said Parson should be pardoned.
In addition to her jury deadlock issues, McLaughlin’s attorney noted her struggles with mental health, and a history of childhood trauma. “Brain injuries and fetal alcohol syndrome are widely diagnosed,” the petition states.
According to the petition, McLaughlin was “abandoned” by his mother, placed in foster care, and in one location “shoved with feces in his face.”
She then suffered abuse and trauma, including bullying from her adoptive father, and battled depression that led to “multiple suicide attempts,” according to the petition.
At trial, McLaughlin’s jurors did not hear expert testimony about her mental state at the time of Gunther’s murder, the petition said. By upholding mitigating factors and refuting the prosecution’s claim that McLaughlin acted with a corrupt mind, he said the scale could have been tipped toward a life sentence. the only aggravating factor.
In 2016, a federal judge vacated McLaughlin’s death sentence because of an ineffective attorney, court records show, on the grounds that her trial attorney did not submit that expert’s testimony. listed in However, this ruling was later overturned by the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.
McLaughlin’s execution “highlights all the flaws in the justice system and would be a huge injustice on many levels,” Comp, her attorney, previously told CNN.
“It ended up continuing the systemic failures that existed throughout Amber’s life and never stopped or intervened to protect her as a child and teenager,” Comp said. “Everything that could have gone wrong had gone wrong for her.”
