First transgender person to be executed in the United States

A woman who was sentenced to death could be the first transgender person to be executed in the state of Missouri, in USA.

This is Amber McLaughlin, 49, who was found guilty of killing an ex-girlfriend in 2003 in a suburb of the city of St. Louis, Missouri, before her transition.

Unless the state governor grants clemency, McLaughlin would receive a lethal injection for the crime.

According to what was compiled by the authorities in 2003, McLaughlin was unhappy with the separation from his girlfriend and went so far as to harass her until she requested protection measures.

On the day of the crime, McLaughlin waited for her outside work with a kitchen knife. Beverly Guenther was raped and stabbed and her body was dumped in the Mississippi River.

At the end of her trial in 2006, a jury found her guilty of the murder, but could not agree on the sentence. The trial judge intervened and imposed the death penalty, an intervention permitted in the states of Missouri and Indiana.

Since it was the judge and not the jury who sought the death penalty, the woman’s lawyers petitioned Gov. Mike Parson to commute her sentence to life in prison.

“The death penalty considered here does not reflect the conscience of the community but rather that of a single judge,” they argued in their clemency petition, which also points to McLaughlin’s difficult childhood and psychiatric disorders.

However, Mike Parson has not granted clemency to any clemency petition since he took office in 2018.

News reports say McLaughlin began her gender transition in recent years but has continued to be held on the men’s section of death row in Missouri.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), which seeks to abolish the punishment in the United States, no openly transgender person has yet been executed in the country. (YO)