The Women's Execution Database

The Website that the data are housed on is to assist researchers and dedicated professionals who are working on behalf of women and revealing gendered and racial injustices. The United States judicial system is predicated upon credible, reliable, evidence. At the very least, judges, lawyers, and advocacy groups should be aware of significant flaws in the quantitative data used by the media and in the courtroom. There is no one reliable data source of women's executions that spans all of American history and encompasses women's experiences with the criminal justice system.

The website hopes to account for black women's invisibility in death penalty data. to promote existing and emerging scholarship that have sought to quantify experiences that are especially relevant to women (e.g., backgrounds of sexual and domestic violence, parental status, mental and health difficulties related to abuse, the relationships [i.e., accomplices] that contributed to the crime). Moreover, the aim is to provide a comprehensive hub for the sharing of scholarship and research. 

My work examines those processes in academia that serve to reinforce patriarchal and racial hierarchies in knowledge production by incorporating the critical insights of Queer, Black Feminist, and Biopolitical (necropolitical) approaches. The earlier decisions made by those responsible for inputting the data are of historical interest, but it is time to not only question their continued usage despite known issues and prevalence in academic scholarship, but to address, once again, how we are asking how far women have really come? Like the cigarette industry, capital punishment is dominated by men and is part of a gendered narrative that kills, but not indiscriminately, and somehow manages to fetishize women--even in the most grim of circumstances.