Women and Their Crimes
T
o understand the differential between the number of men and women who were executed between 1608 and 2002, I ran a query to get the raw information and then plugged that into the Google Charts API to visualize it. Out of 15,269 executed individuals in the database, only 365 were women and 154 were recorded as unknown. (I did not attempt to standardize the unknowns without further research.)
Variety
Given the low number of women executed, I wanted to understand what crimes these women committed. The following chart represents the totals for each type. This data has not been normalized to account for changes in the felony laws over time. For example, the number and type of executable offenses has diminished over time. Additionally, individual states may have had specific or unique executable offenses. That information, which critical to a deeper understanding of this data, requires further research.
Based on these results, I would like to understand the specific circumstances of the 266 murder cases, including the age and sex of the victims. What made these murders different from the ones that resulted in either an acquittal or a pardon? Additionally, what is the ratio of the number of women sentenced to die versus the number actually executed? Both of these lines of inquiry require further study.