The US state of Missouri carried out the first execution in the country three days after the beginning of the year. For the first time, a transgender woman is executed for the murder of her ex-girlfriend. Lawyers had previously tried several times to mitigate the sentence.
A transgender man has been executed in the United States for the first time. The death penalty against Amber M., who was convicted of murder, was carried out on Tuesday evening, the Missouri state prison administration said. According to a report by local broadcaster Fox2now, she had been given a lethal injection.
The 49-year-old was the first transgender person ever to be executed in the United States. It was also the first execution of a death penalty in the United States this year. M., who was still a man at the time, was convicted of murdering her ex-girlfriend in a suburb of St. Louis in 2006. According to the verdict, she ambushed her ex-girlfriend in 2003, raped her, stabbed her with a kitchen knife and dumped her body in the Mississippi River.
At the trial, the jury found M. guilty but could not agree on the sentence. The judge therefore intervened and imposed the death penalty. M.'s lawyers had therefore asked Governor Mike Parson to commute the sentence to life imprisonment. They also argued with M. difficult childhood, with a violent adoptive father and psychological problems of the convicts. The governor, however, did not grant the request.
According to media reports, M. had started her gender reassignment a few years ago. Amber M., who had been sentenced under her former name Scott M., was on the men's section of her prison's death row to the end.
The 49-year-old had exhausted all legal remedies against the verdict. Her lawyer had tried in vain until the last minute to persuade the governor of Missouri, Republican Mike Parsons, to pardon her. Parsons declined a pardon Tuesday. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than 1,500 people have been executed in the United States since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.
