Transgender American woman executed in the United States
Steph Deschamps / January 5, 2023
Inmate Amber McLaughlin, undated photo provided by Missouri corrections authoritiesHandout
An American woman who was sentenced to death for the murder of her ex-girlfriend became the first transgender woman to be executed in the United States on Tuesday.
Amber McLaughlin, 49, also became the first person executed in 2023 in the country.
The American received a lethal injection and was declared dead at 18:51 local time in the Bonne Terre penitentiary in the central state of Missouri, according to a statement, for a murder committed in 2003, before her transition. According to local media, she had been held on male death row.
Amber McLaughlin had killed her ex-girlfriend in the suburbs of St. Louis, the big city of Missouri.
She had not endured their separation and had been harassing her ever since, to the point that her former girlfriend had obtained protective measures.
But on the day of the crime, Amber McLaughlin waited for her outside of work with a kitchen knife and raped and stabbed her before dumping her body near the Mississippi River, according to local media.
At the end of her trial in 2006, the jurors found her guilty of the murder, but they could not agree on the sentence. A judge decided on the death penalty.
The states of Missouri and Indiana are the only states that allow their judges to impose death sentences in the absence of unanimity in the jury pool.
Based on this singularity, Amber McLaughlin's lawyers had asked Republican Governor Mike Parson to commute her sentence to life in prison.
"The death penalty considered here does not reflect the conscience of the community but that of a single judge," they wrote in their request for clemency, which also invokes their client's difficult childhood and psychiatric disorders.
Their request had received the support of several personalities, including two elected representatives of Missouri in the American Congress, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver.
In a letter to the governor, they recalled the abuse she suffered as a child in her adoptive family. In a letter to the governor, they recalled the abuse she suffered as a child in her adoptive family. "Alongside this horrific abuse, she struggled silently with issues of gender identity," they wrote.
According to the authoritative Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), no openly transgender person had yet been executed in the United States, "but the issue (had) gained attention in recent months with the Ohio Supreme Court upholding the death sentence of Victoria Drain and the commutation of Tara Zyst's death sentence in Oregon, both of whom are transgender women. »
Since his election, Governor Mike Parson has not accepted any of the clemency requests that have been submitted to him.