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September 24, 2010

Virginia Executes First Woman in Nearly 100 Years
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The state of Virginia executed forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis last
night despite claims that she was borderline mentally retarded with an
IQ of seventy-two. Lewis is the first woman to be executed in Virginia
in nearly a century and the first woman to be executed anywhere in the
United States since 2005. She was convicted of plotting with her young
lover to kill her husband and stepson for insurance money. Supporters of
Lewis had urged for her life to be spared because she was borderline
mentally retarded, with the intellectual ability of about a
thirteen-year-old. Teresa Lewis’s attorney Jim Rocap spoke after the
execution.

Jim Rocap: "Tonight the machinery of death in Virginia extinguished the
beautiful, childlike and loving human spirit of Teresa Lewis. For her
family and friends, for her fellow inmates at Fluvanna, for her
thousands of supporters in Virginia, the United States and around the
world, her death is a tragic loss."



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