A prisoner was put to death by lethal injection yesterday in what is believed to be the first execution of a transgender woman in the Unite States.
Amber McLaughlin, 49, was convicted of stalking and killing a former girlfriend, then dumping her body near the Mississippi River in St Louis in 2003. Her fate was sealed on Tuesday when Mike Parson, the Republican governor of Missouri, declined a clemency request.
McLaughlin spoke quietly with a spiritual adviser at her side as the fatal dose of pentobarbital was injected. She was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
“I am sorry for what I did,” McLaughlin had said in a final written statement. “I am a loving and caring person.”
A database from the Death Penalty Information Center, an anti-execution campaign group, shows that 1,558 prisoners have been killed in the US since the death penalty was re-instated in 1976. All but 17 of those put to death were men. The centre said there are no known previous cases of an openly transgender inmate being executed. McLaughlin began transitioning about three years ago at the state prison in Potosi.
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The clemency petition cited McLaughlin’s traumatic childhood and mental health issues, which were not discussed during her trial. It cited severe depression that resulted in multiple suicide attempts, both as a child and as an adult.
The petition also said that McLaughlin had received a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a condition that causes anguish and other symptoms as a result of a disparity between a person’s gender identity and their sex at birth. But McLaughlin’s sexual identity was “not the main focus” of the clemency request, her lawyer, Larry Komp, said.
She was originally convicted in 2006 of the murder of Beverly Guenther, 45, who had taken a restraining order against McLaughlin before her death.
A judge sentenced McLaughlin to death after a jury were split over it. Komp said Missouri and Indiana are the only US states that allow a judge to sentence someone to death.
A court in 2016 ordered a new sentencing hearing, but a federal appeals court panel reinstated the death penalty in 2021.
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“McLaughlin terrorised Ms Guenther in the final years of her life but we hope her family and loved ones may finally have some peace,” Parson said in a written statement after the execution.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated there are 3,200 transgender inmates in America’s prisons and jails.
