Will Georgia execute this woman?

The Gwinnett County jury decided that though she didn’t wield the knife, she was just as responsible for her husband’s death as Owen, if not more so because she hatched the plan.

In two weeks, Gissendaner is scheduled to die from lethal injection for the 1997 malice murder of her husband, Douglas. She’ll go before the State Board of Pardons and Paroles on Feb. 24, in a final effort to save her life. If her clemency plea and last-ditch appeals fail, she’ll be executed the next day at 7 p.m. at the state prison in Jackson. It would make her the first woman in Georgia to be executed since 1945 and the 16th woman to be executed in the United States since 1976.

That number is about 1 percent of all executions during the past 39 years. And yet, it is that 1 percent that grabs headlines and the public’s attention each time a woman is led into an execution chamber, strapped to a gurney and given a lethal injection.

Like Gissendaner, all of the women who’ve been executed were convicted murderers. Some shot their husbands, some got other people to do it. One smothered her children. One killed a police officer. But apart from the debate over the morality of the death penalty, why we sentence women to death is a question that has bedeviled scholars and those in the legal community for decades. It’s an issue that brings up questions of fairness, perceptions of gender roles and culture, and forces an examination of how the legal system itself works.

And even after all that, say stakeholders, it boils down to this: there are no answers.

A 2 percent chance

Unless she is granted clemency, Gissendaner will fall into that rare category of women, the ones who actually step into the death chamber. Only about 2 to 3 percent of women on death row ever get executed, said Victor Streib, professor emeritus Ohio Northern University and former dean of the law school. After 30 years of studying how the death penalty is applied to women, that’s one of the only facts he feels sure of.

After studying thousands of death penalty cases involving men and women, Streib said, it was clear that at every stage of the legal process, women were less likely to be considered for the death penalty. It’s the why that eludes scholars.

“There’s not one point in the system where we can say, ‘Ah-ha, that’s the reason,’” Streib said. “I’ve talked with lawyers and judges who do death penalty cases and I say, ‘What if the facts of two murder cases were the same except that the offender was a woman in one of them. Would you still go for the death penalty (for the woman)? They hesitate or get a funny look on their face and say, ‘Well…’

“I always suspected that we’re just reluctant to execute women, like putting women in combat.”

He even examined whether the legacy of the women’s movement of the 1970s had any impact on the relative frequency with which women have been executed since 1998. He found none.

“They are so rare that if one or two happen in a year that it seems like a wave,” Streib said.

'A difference in the way women are treated'

Richard Dieter is the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. He agreed with Streib that the execution of a woman draws attention because it is unusual. But the rarity of those executions also gives scholars little to study: the sample of women who have been put to death is quite small. As of mid-2014, of 3,049 people on death row nationwide, 59 were women. Gissendaner is the only woman in Georgia.

But former Alabama Circuit Judge Joseph Colquitt, now a law professor at the University of Alabama, said that in his years on the bench, it was obvious to him that the sex of a murder defendant had an impact on both jurors and judges.

“I’m not a social scientist, but I think there is a difference in the way women are treated in regard to sentencing and some of it has to do with our views on women in society,” Colquitt said.

Most people who commit crimes do them when they are young. For a woman standing in front of a jury, particularly if she is very young and has children, or if she herself has been the victim of abuse, she could seem a more likely candidate for rehabilitation than a man accused of the same crime, Colquitt said.

“It has to be recognized that some judges consider that,” he said.

But if the murder was particularly cruel or violent — and especially if it involved the deaths of children — juries may be more likely to consider meting out a death sentence.

‘She kind of took her chances’

In Gissendaner’s case, prosecutors argued that she convinced Owen that the only way they could be together was if her husband died and they could collect his insurance money. Court records say she gave Owen a nightstick and a knife to kill her husband with and let Owen into her house so he could ambush her husband while she was out with friends. Then she picked Owen up near a wooded area they’d agreed upon after he stabbed her husband to death.

During the trial, prosecutors argued that Owen had been “the bullet,” but that Kelly Gissendaner had been “the gun.”

Years after her conviction, Gissendaner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution she deserved to be in prison, but not to die for a crime that Owen may one day walk away from after serving his sentence.

That argument likely to come up in her clemency hearing, though it has been raised repeatedly during her appeals.

The question of fairness can play a factor in how a defendant is sentenced in a murder trial where there is an accomplice. Why should two people accused of the same crime receive different sentences? In Gissendaner’s case, said Danny Porter, the Gwinnett County District Attorney who sought the death penalty, the defendant sealed her fate.

“For whatever reason she refused the offer to testify against her co-defendant,” Porter said. “She kind of took her chances. Whether that was based on bad legal advice or her position at the time, which may have changed over the years.”

Porter said he still agrees with the jury’s decision to impose the death penalty, though the parole board will have to decide if the sentence should be carried out.

“You could say he took responsibility because he took the deal,” Porter said. “Whereas Gissendaner left us with almost no choice.”

‘Is this the worst woman?’

One of the last women on death row, before Gissendaner landed there, was Rebecca Machetti.

She had been convicted with two others, including her husband, of killing her ex-husband and his new wife in 1974 for insurance money.

Machetti’s husband was sentenced to death as well and was executed. The third person got life.

Rebecca Machetti served several years in prison before she got a new trial and new sentence of life in prison. She was paroled in 2010 at age 71.

Gissendaner has little hope of a new trial. Her attorneys did not return calls for comment. Perhaps her only hope in the coming days is for them to convince the parole board that she deserves the same sentence as her co-conspirator.

“Is this the worst woman to have passed through Georgia in more than 60 years?" Deiter said. “I don’t know.”