In less than three weeks, Karla Faye Tucker will be the first woman to be executed in the US since 1984, unless she is reprieved by Governor George W. Bush, who may yet become the next president in 2000.
Since he has become governor of Texas, Mr Bush, son of the former president, has never reprieved a death row prisoner. He has said he will not consider her gender when reviewing Ms Tucker's case, so her chances of escaping death by lethal injection on February 3rd look slim.
But it is the fact that Ms Tucker (38) is a woman which is causing the mounting attention, at home and abroad, to her plight. Whether this is right in an era when equality of the sexes in every other sphere is demanded raises questions not easy to answer.
Texas, which executes more criminals than any other state - 37 last year - has not executed a woman since Chipita Rodriguez was hanged in 1863 for killing a horsetrader. This must be due to some southern gallantry towards women, or squeamishness.
A more cynical explanation is that executing women could cause a revulsion against the death penalty which Texas so favours.
Governor Bush is coming under pressure to be gallant this time. Even the Christian right, which favours the death penalty, is pleading through the influential Rev Pat Robertson for her life.
This is because Ms Tucker has become a fervent bornagain Christian while awaiting death. Mr Robertson describes her as "an extraordinary woman" who deserves mercy because of her "authentic spiritual conversion".
Here again, Governor Bush faces a dilemma. It is not uncommon for death row prisoners to have bornagain experiences and show great repentance for their crimes. But this has never been regarded as a mitigating factor when sentences are being reviewed after all legal channels have been exhausted.
There are 400 people on death row in Texas. Seven are women and a number of the total condemned are now practising Christians and regret the crimes which have brought them face to face with death, strapped to a gurney in Huntsville prison.
It is the repulsive nature of the murders committed by Ms Tucker which makes her transformation to a gentle-spoken woman, noted for her Christian apostolate to fellow prisoners, so striking. She has also married a prison chaplain, the Rev Dana Brown, although they have never been allowed to touch or embrace.
Back in June, 1983, Ms Tucker was a prostitute in Houston, high on drugs the weekend she and her boyfriend used a pickaxe to hack to death her exlover, Jerry Lynn Dean, and Deborah Thornton, his partner, as they slept. Ms Tucker left the pickaxe embedded in Thornton's chest and boasted she experienced an orgasm every time she swung it.
Today, a brother and sister of the two victims, the detective who helped convict Ms Tucker, Amnesty International - including Bianca Jagger - the European Parliament, thousands of anti-death penalty activists and church groups are all urging Governor Bush to reprieve her.
But as a politician facing re-election this year, Mr Bush could damage his standing as a law and order governor if he spares Ms Tucker's life. Yet the intervention of Mr Robertson, founder of the Christian Coalition, in her favour, must carry weight in a state where he is an influential figure.
On the weekend of the murders, she and her boyfriend had consumed an astonishing array of drugs and alcohol. He was also sentenced to death in 1984 but died in prison before execution.
Today as she knits on death row, Ms Tucker is a changed person, it is argued, so Texas would not be executing a murderess but a saint. Ms Tucker sees her execution as a providential way of making people see the wrongness of the death penalty. She has said this week she still hopes for a reprieve as she is "no longer a continual threat to society". But she is also resigned to her likely fate. "Whatever He [God] wants to do with my life now, I'll walk with Him, because it's causing the system to look at what they are doing," she says. But she has also acknowledged that "if you believe in the death penalty for one, you believe in it for everyone".
So will there be sex discrimination on death row? Governor Bush and the Pardons Board which he appoints will probably say no.