Time is up for Tucker

At midnight tonight Irish time, Karla Faye Tucker will almost certainly die in the Texas execution chamber and become the first woman to be executed in the state since the Civil War. The parole board has turned down her appeal for clemency, and Governor George W. Bush, son of the former president, cannot override the decision but only postpone the execution for 30 days.She has said what she will be thinking as she walks to her death by lethal injection. "I'll be thinking about the families I've hurt, my family, my husband and ultimately Jesus coming and escorting me home. And I'll be thinking: what can I do to glorify the Lord in my life and in my death?"Her death, accepted with dignity and faith, is in striking contrast to the two murders for which she and a boyfriend were convicted. Early on June 13th, 1983, high on drugs and alcohol, they hacked to death with a pickaxe her former boyfriend, Jerry Lynn Dean, and the woman he was sleeping with, Deborah Thornton. They had come to steal the motorcycle of the male victim and he had resisted.On a tape played at her trial, Tucker said she had experienced an orgasm with every swing of the axe. It was left embedded seven inches in the chest of the woman victim.It is almost impossible to associate the "monster", as the husband of the dead woman calls Tucker, who did this deed with the gently spoken woman of 38 who has been interviewed countless times in recent weeks on Death Row, speaking of her religious conversion and her desire to be spared execution so that she can continue her Christian ministry to other prisoners.Those urging Governor Bush to reprieve Tucker include Pope John Paul, the European Parliament, the Rev Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition which favours the death penalty, the brother of the woman she murdered, the detective who arrested her, the former prosecutor, prison guards, Amnesty International and thousands of anti-capital punishment activists in the US and around the world.But her chances of a commutation to life imprisonment were almost nil in Texas, which executed 37 men last year or half the total for the whole of the US. Since the death penalty was restored, Texas has executed 144 men starting in 1982, and the parole board has never used its power to commute a death sentence.The board was appointed by Governor Bush and would share his views on the death penalty. He is also facing re-election later this year in a state which overwhelmingly wants to execute murderers.The US Supreme Court has heard an appeal from Tucker that the parole board system in Texas is flawed and unconstitutional as it never shows clemency. At time of writing the decision of the court has not been announced.It has been difficult for opponents of capital punishment to cite Tucker's sex as a reason to spare her life. She herself has said: "I say gender should not play any role in this at all." And there are six other women on Death Row in Texas.The main argument for her to be spared, other than from those who are against the death penalty in principle, was her religious conversion and how she was not the same person who committed the horrible murder. This is why Mr Robertson has pleaded for her life.But here again, it would be difficult to make an exception for Tucker. There are almost 3,300 persons on Death Row in the US, and many of them have been "born again" and become fervent Christians or Muslims, but these conversions have rarely if ever influenced a reprieve.SO WHY has Tucker's case attracted so much attention? She has never contested her conviction and says that up to 1993 she "believed in the death penalty" and "thought there was no punishment big enough" to make up for her crime.Through prayer she has changed her view, but "that doesn't mean the world will. That doesn't mean the circumstances aren't there for execution. But I know the value of human life now. I can't believe in the death penalty or abortion or mercy killings. I've been in a position to take life. I know how horrible it is," she said in one of her last interviews.The situation concerning the death penalty in the US is a mess. There are figures to show that ethnic minorities are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites for the same crime, that only one out of 100 convicted murderers is sentenced to death and that since 1972 more than 60 innocent people have been released from Death Row.The delays in the system are also seen as unfair to all concerned, families of murder victims as well as the condemned themselves. Because so little funding is allowed for lawyers for those who cannot pay themselves, the condemned can wait for up to five years just to get a lawyer to process their appeals.So slow are the complex appeals procedures that it is estimated that, with the numbers on Death Row growing by 100 to 150 a year, more prisoners there will die of old age than will be executed. Proponents of the death penalty say this shows that every effort is made to exhaust the appeals of the condemned before the final stage.When Ireland and Britain had the death penalty, the condemned were given three Sundays following the dismissal of their appeals to prepare for their executions. Tucker has spent 14 years on Death Row. Her partner in crime died of illness on Death Row.Efforts have been made to speed up the process by reducing the numbers of appeals. It is the zeal of Texas to apply the new procedures that has put it well ahead of the other states for executions. Judge Mike McCormick, who presides over the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, says that last year's total of executions gave Texas a deceptive reputation for assembly-line justice. The state was one of the first to reinstitute the death penalty after the Supreme Court restored it in 1976, and many of these cases are just now coming to the end of the appeals process, he explains.There seems no possibility that capital punishment in the US will be abolished as it has in all western European countries. About 70 per cent of those polled are in favour of it for murder.Yet there is clearly a reluctance to execute women. There are, of course, fewer women murderers, and juries are also reluctant to sentence women to death both for reasons of their sex and that their crimes are mostly not as gruesome or cold-blooded as those of men.Karla Faye Tucker was not one of those, but the publicity surrounding her execution may yet give a boost to those who campaign against the death penalty.