Amber McLaughlin, 49, is about to die for stalking a former girlfriend and stabbing her to death nearly 20 years ago. With no legal appeals planned, McLaughlin’s fate rests with Republican Gov. Mike Parson, who’s weighing a clemency request.
A database for the anti-execution Death Penalty Information Center shows 1,558 people have been executed for the reason that death penalty was reinstated within the mid-Nineteen Seventies. All but 17 of them were men, and the middle said there are not any known previous cases through which an openly transgender inmate was executed.
A clemency petition cited McLaughlin’s traumatic childhood and mental health issues, which the jury never heard at her trial. A foster parent rubbed feces in her face when she was a toddler and her adoptive father used a stun gun on her, based on the petition, which also cited severe depression leading to multiple suicide attempts, each as a toddler and as an adult.
The petition also included reports citing a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, a condition causing anguish and other symptoms consequently of a disparity between an individual’s gender identity and their assigned sex at birth. But McLaughlin’s sexual identity is “not the important focus” of the clemency request, said her attorney, Larry Komp.
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In 2003, long before transitioning, McLaughlin was in a relationship with Beverly Guenther. After they stopped dating, McLaughlin would seem on the suburban St. Louis office where Guenther worked, sometimes hiding contained in the constructing, based on court records. Guenther obtained a restraining order and cops occasionally escorted her to her automobile after work.
Guenther’s neighbors called police on the night of Nov. 20, 2003, when she did not return home. Officers went to the office constructing, where they found a broken knife handle near her automobile and a trail of blood. A day later, McLaughlin led police to a location near the Mississippi River in St. Louis where the body had been dumped.
McLaughlin was convicted of first-degree murder in 2006. A judge sentenced McLaughlin to death after a jury deadlocked on the sentence. Komp said Missouri and Indiana are the one states that allow a judge, slightly than a jury, to sentence someone to death.
A court in 2016 ordered a latest sentencing hearing, but a federal appeals court panel reinstated the death penalty in 2021.
McLaughlin began transitioning about three years ago, recalled Jessica Hicklin. Hicklin, 43, sued the Missouri Department of Corrections, difficult a policy that prohibited hormone therapy for inmates who weren’t receiving it before being incarcerated. She won the lawsuit in 2018 and have become a mentor to other transgender inmates, including McLaughlin.
Hicklin, who spent 26 years in prison for a drug-related killing before being released a yr ago, described McLaughlin as a painfully shy one that got here out of her shell after deciding to transition.
“She all the time had a smile and a dad joke,” Hicklin said. “In case you ever talked to her, it was all the time with the dad jokes.”
The Bureau of Justice Statistics has estimated there are 3,200 transgender inmates within the nation’s prisons and jails.
Perhaps the best-known case of a transgender prisoner looking for hormone therapy was that of Chelsea Manning, the previous Army intelligence analyst who served seven years in federal prison for leaking government documents to Wikileaks until President Barack Obama commuted the sentence in 2017. The Army agreed to pay for hormone treatments for Manning in 2015.
McLaughlin has not had hormone treatments, Komp said.
The U.S. Department of Justice wrote in a 2015 court filing that state prison officials must treat an inmate’s gender identity condition just as they might treat other medical or mental health conditions, no matter when the diagnosis occurred.
The one woman ever executed in Missouri was Bonnie B. Heady, who was put to death on Dec. 18, 1953, for kidnapping and killing a 6-year-old boy. Heady was executed within the gas chamber alongside the opposite kidnapper and killer, Carl Austin Hall.
Nationally, 18 people were executed in 2022, including two in Missouri. Kevin Johnson was put to death in November for the ambush killing of a Kirkwood, Missouri, police officer. Carman Deck was executed in May for killing James and Zelma Long during a robbery at their home in De Soto, Missouri.
One other Missouri inmate, Leonard Taylor, is scheduled to die Feb. 7. He was convicted of killing his girlfriend and her three young children.
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