A transgender woman was put to death in the US late Tuesday evening in what is the first such execution in the country, officials said. Amber McLaughlin, 49, who was accused of murder, was pronounced dead shortly before 7 pm local time at the Diagnostic and Correctional Center in the town of Bonne Terre, Missouri, according to a statement from the state prison department.
According to the local news station Fox2now, McLaughlin died by lethal injection. This was the first time a transgender person of either sex was executed in the country. She also becomes the first person to die of capital punishment this year in America.
McLaughlin was convicted of killing her former girlfriend in 2003 in a suburb of St. Louis, before she transitioned. The victim had to obtain a restraining order against McLaughlin who was stalking her.
The day of the killing, McLaughlin waited for the woman, named Beverly Guenther, as she left work. She was then raped and stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. Her body was dumped near the Mississippi river.
McLaughlin was found guilty of murder in 2006 by a jury which could not reach a punishment for her. The trial judge then imposed a death penalty, a provision allowed in Missouri and Indiana.
Her lawyers then cited this fact to ask Governor Mike Parson to commute her sentence to life in prison.
“The death sentence now being considered does not come from the conscience of the community, but from a single judge,” her attorneys argued in their clemency request.
They also argued that McLaughlin had had a troubled childhood and suffered from mental health issues.
A few other influential people, including two Missouri members of the US House of Representatives, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver, supported her cause. They wrote a letter to the governor in which they argued that McLaughlin’s adoptive father used to beat her with a baton and even tasered her.
“Alongside this horrendous abuse, she was also silently struggling with her identity, grappling with what we now understand is gender dysphoria,” the letter stated. The condition describes people feeling their sex at birth and gender identity do not match.
Press reports said McLaughlin began her gender transition in recent years but had remained in the men’s section of death row in Missouri.
(With inputs from agencies)
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