Amber McLaughlin, condemned to death for the murder of his ex-partner, committed before her transition, also became the first person executed in 2023 in the country.
mo12345lemonde with AFP
An American became, Tuesday, January 3, the first transgender person to be executed in the United States. Amber McLaughlin, 49, sentenced to death for the murder of his ex-partner, received a lethal injection and was declared dead at 6:51 p.m. local time in the Penitentiary of good land in the State of Missouri (Center ), according to a press release.
According to local media, she had remained in the corridor of male death. She also became the first person executed in 2023 in the country.
Amber McLaughlin had killed, in 2003, before his transition, his ex-partner in the suburbs of Saint-Louis, the big city of Missouri. She had not supported their separation and has harassed her since, to the point that her former girlfriend had obtained protective measures. But the day of the crime, Amber McLaughlin was waiting for him at the end of his work with a kitchen knife and had raped it and then stabbed before abandoning his body near the Mississippi river, according to local media.
At the end of his trial in 2006, the jurors had found him guilty of the murder, but they had failed to agree on the penalty to inflict him. A judge had then decided by retaining the capital punishment. The States of Missouri and Indiana are the only ones to authorize their magistrates to pronounce death penalties in the absence of unanimity in the popular jury.
Remontained refused
Drawing on this singularity, the lawyers of Amber McLaughlin had asked the Republican Governor Mike Parson to commute his sentence in life prison. “The death penalty considered here does not reflect the conscience of the community but that of a single judge,” they wrote in their request for Clémence, which also invokes difficult childhood and the psychiatric disorders of their client.
Their request had received the support of several personalities, including two elected officials from Missouri to the American Congress, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver. In a letter addressed to the governor, they recalled the abuse suffered in her adoptive family when she was still a child. “Besides these horrible abuses, she struggled in silence against questions of identity (…) of gender”, they wrote.
Since his election, Governor Mike Parson has not accepted any of the merciless requests that have been submitted to him.
According to the Information Center on the Death Sentence (DPIC), which refers, no openly transgender person had yet been executed in the United States, “but the question [had] attracted the latter months with the confirmation by the Supreme Court of Ohio of the capital sentence inflicted on Victoria Drain and the switching of that of Tara Zyst in Oregon, two transgender women “.