24th September, 2010
The first woman executed in the United States in five years was put to death in Virginia on Thursday for arranging the killings of her husband and a stepson over a $250,000 insurance payment.
According to Associated Press, AP, Teresa Lewis, 41, died by injection at 9:13 p.m. Thursday, authorities said.
She became the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly a century.
Supporters and relatives of the victims watched her execution at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt.
Lewis enticed two men through sex, cash and a promised cut in an insurance policy to shoot her husband, Julian Clifton Lewis Jr., and his son, Charles, as they slept in October 2002.
Both triggermen were sentenced to life in prison and one committed suicide in 2006.
Lewis appeared fearful, her jaw clenched, as she was escorted into the death chamber.
She glanced tensely around at 14 assembled corrections officials before being bound to a gurney with heavy leather straps.
Moments before her execution, Lewis asked if her husbandâ€
Kathy Clifton, Lewisâ€
“I want Kathy to know that I love her and Iâ€
Then, as the drugs flowed into her body, her feet bobbed but she otherwise remained motionless. A guard lightly tapped her on the shoulder reassuringly as she slipped into death.
More than 7,300 appeals to stop the execution — the first of a woman in Virginia since 1912 — had been made to the governor in a state second only to Texas in the number of people it executes.
The U.S. Supreme Court and Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell declined to intervene. All her legal appeals were exhausted, her attorney said.
Texas held the most recent U.S. execution of a woman in 2005. Out of more than 1,200 people put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 have been women.
The 41-year-old woman, who defence attorneys said was borderline mentally disabled, had inspired other inmates by singing Christian hymns in prison. Her fate also had drawn appeals from the European Union, an indignant rebuke from Iran and the disgust of thousands of people.
The Lewis execution stirred an unusual amount of attention because of her gender, claims she lacked the intelligence to mastermind the killings and the post-conviction emergence of defence evidence that one of the triggermen manipulated her.
Lewisâ€
In a letter this month to McDonnell, the European Union asked the governor to commute her sentence to life, citing Lewisâ€
The European Unionâ€
French Foreign Ministry spokesman Romain Nadal said in an online briefing Thursday it “deplored†the rejection of Lewisâ€
Earlier this week, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad accused Western media of having a double standard in reporting on the Lewis execution.
He compared coverage of the Lewis case to the “heavy propaganda†campaign against the case of an Iranian woman who had been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery.
“Meanwhile, nobody objects to the case of an American woman who is going to be executed,â€Â he was quoted as saying during a speech Monday to Islamic clerics and other figures in New York.
Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center agreed that the death penalty is a human rights issue, but said the Iranian president is “the wrong messenger.â€
“The United States is, of course, interested in human rights abuses,†he said.
Hours before her execution, Lewis met with family, her spiritual adviser and supporters at the Greensville Correctional Center.
Her spiritual adviser, the Rev. Julie Perry, stood sobbing as she later witnessed the execution, clutching a religious book.
Throughout her life, a faith in God had been a seeming constant for Lewis — whether it was the prayer with her husband or her ministry behind bars.
But by her own admission, Lewisâ€
“I was doing drugs, stealing, lying and having several affairs during my marriages,â€Â Lewis wrote in a statement that was read at a prison religious service in August. “I went to church every Sunday, Friday and revivals but guess what? I didnâ€
Her father said she ran off to get married, then later abandoned her children and ran off with her sisterâ€
Lewisâ€
Both men would have to die for Lewis to receive the insurance payout.
She met at a Walmart with the two men who ultimately killed Julian Lewis and his son. Lewis began an affair with Matthew Shallenberger and later had sex with the other triggerman, Rodney Fuller. She also arranged sex with Fuller and her daughter, who was 16, in a parking lot.
On the night before Halloween in 2002, after she prayed with her husband, Lewis got out of bed, unlocked the door to their mobile home and put the coupleâ€
On a grassy knoll beside the correctional center, those opposed to the execution protested with signs and banners in the twilight Thursday. Critics said they were repulsed by Virginiaâ€
“Tonight the death machine exterminated the beautiful childlike and loving spirit of Teresa Lewis,†said the condemned womanâ€