Fewer than 50 women are on death row in the United States. As of late 2025, 47 women were under a capital sentence, spread across 14 states, making up roughly 2% of the national death row population.1Death Penalty Information Center. Women They are housed in small specialized units inside women’s prisons, live under near-constant isolation, and in most cases wait decades while their sentences move through appeal after appeal.
How Many Women Are Under a Death Sentence, and Where
California accounts for the largest share by far, with 21 women under a death sentence. Texas follows with seven and Alabama with five. Arizona and Ohio each hold three. Florida and North Carolina each have two. One woman sits on death row in each of Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Tennessee.1Death Penalty Information Center. Women California’s dominant share reflects its historically broad use of capital sentencing rather than any pattern of carrying executions out; the state has had a moratorium on executions in place for years.
The federal government also sentences women to death and holds them at the Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The last federal execution of a woman was Lisa Montgomery in January 2021, the first federal execution of a woman since 1953.
Twenty-seven states still authorize capital punishment, four of them under gubernatorial moratoriums. Many of those states currently have no women on death row at all. Since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, only 18 women have been executed in the entire country, about 1% of all executions carried out in that period.2Death Penalty Information Center. Executions of Women
How a Woman Ends Up on Death Row
A death sentence requires more than a murder conviction. The prosecution has to secure a conviction for a killing that qualifies as a capital offense under the law of the jurisdiction where the case is tried. What counts as a capital offense varies, but it usually includes murder committed during another serious felony such as kidnapping or robbery, killing a law enforcement officer, murder for hire, or killing multiple victims. Premeditated murder is the most familiar route, though felony murder — a killing during the commission of another crime — can also qualify in many states without a specific intent to kill.
After a jury convicts on the capital charge, the case moves into a separate penalty phase. This is where the actual fight over the sentence happens. The prosecution has to prove at least one statutory aggravating factor beyond a reasonable doubt. Under federal law, if no aggravating factor is found, the court must impose a sentence other than death.3Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 3593 – Special Hearing to Determine Whether a Sentence of Death Is Justified Common aggravators include killing in an especially cruel manner involving torture, killing for financial gain, or targeting a particularly vulnerable victim.4Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 18 USC 3592 – Mitigating and Aggravating Factors to Be Considered in Determining Whether a Sentence of Death Is Justified State capital statutes generally follow a similar structure.
The jury then weighs those aggravators against mitigating evidence the defense presents. Mitigation can include childhood abuse, mental illness, lack of a prior criminal record, or any other circumstance that argues against the ultimate penalty. If the aggravating factors sufficiently outweigh the mitigating ones, the jury returns a death sentence. Two cases with nearly identical facts can end differently depending on the defendant’s history and what the jury makes of it.
Some categories of people cannot be sentenced to death at all. In Atkins v. Virginia, decided in 2002, the Supreme Court held that executing people with intellectual disability violates the Eighth Amendment.5Justia Law. Atkins v Virginia, 536 US 304 (2002) Later decisions barred rigid IQ cutoffs and lay stereotypes as the test, requiring states to use clinical diagnostic standards instead.6Death Penalty Information Center. Continuing Issues – Determining Intellectual Disability After Atkins These claims surface regularly in women’s capital appeals, where mental health and cognitive issues often feature in the mitigation record.
Where Women on Death Row Are Held
Women condemned to death are not held in the large, purpose-built death row complexes used for men. The numbers are too small for that. Instead, each state places its female capital inmates in a specialized wing inside an existing women’s prison, separated from general population by security barriers rather than by distance.
In California, women with death sentences have historically been housed at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. A 2016 ballot measure gave prison officials the authority to transfer condemned inmates to any state prison with adequate security, so placement is no longer fixed by law.7California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. California Capital Punishment In Texas, women on death row are held at the Patrick L. O’Daniel Unit in Gatesville, formerly known as the Mountain View Unit, in a separate wing within a facility that also houses general population inmates.8Texas Department of Criminal Justice. O’Daniel (MV) – Unit Directory Federal female death row inmates are held at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, a facility that primarily operates as a medical center for female federal prisoners.
The physical setup inside these units runs on constant surveillance and controlled movement: reinforced doors, monitoring systems, restrictive cell layouts, limited contact between inmates. Because the units are small, sometimes holding only a handful of women, the social environment is nothing like the crowded death row blocks that house dozens or hundreds of men.
Daily Life and Conditions
Daily life is defined by isolation. Women on death row typically spend 22 to 23 hours per day alone in their cells, excluded from the educational programs, job assignments, and social activities available to other prisoners.9Death Penalty Information Center. Time on Death Row The remaining hour or two is for recreation in a small secured outdoor area, often alone or with one or two other inmates under close supervision.
Contact with the outside world is tightly controlled. Phone calls are limited and monitored. Mail is inspected before delivery. Many facilities restrict death row inmates to non-contact visits, with a glass partition separating the inmate from visitors. Some allow contact visits based on behavior and security classification, but that is the exception.
The waits are long. The average person executed in 2020 had spent nearly 19 years on death row, and that figure has only grown.10Bureau of Justice Statistics. Capital Punishment, 2020 – Statistical Tables Research into prolonged solitary confinement under these conditions documents serious mental health deterioration, including anxiety, depression, hallucinations, and cognitive decline, and several Supreme Court justices have questioned whether decades of such confinement before execution amount to punishment beyond the sentence itself.11Death Penalty Information Center. Conditions on Death Row Many legal experts have gone further, calling prolonged isolation under these conditions comparable to torture.
Women experience an additional layer of difficulty. Death row facilities were designed around male populations, so the specific physical and mental health needs of women are frequently overlooked. The small size of female death row units, sometimes down to a single inmate, produces a degree of social deprivation beyond what male death row inmates generally face.
The Appeals Process
A death sentence is not the end of the case. Every capital conviction moves through multiple layers of review, usually over more than a decade. The sequence generally runs: direct appeal to the state’s highest court, state post-conviction review (where the defendant can raise issues such as ineffective counsel or newly discovered evidence), and then federal habeas corpus review.
Federal habeas petitions in capital cases are subject to strict filing deadlines under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. In states that meet certain requirements for appointing qualified counsel, the deadline runs 180 days after state appeals conclude, with tolling for pending Supreme Court review and state post-conviction proceedings.12Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 28 USC 2263 – Filing of Habeas Corpus Application; Time Requirements; Tolling Rules Missing the deadline can permanently bar a claim from federal review.
Innocence claims continue to emerge throughout this process. Since 1973, at least 202 people wrongly convicted and sentenced to death have been exonerated.13Death Penalty Information Center. Innocence DNA evidence is only available in a small share of murder cases, and access to post-conviction testing varies by state.
Clemency and Commutation
Clemency is the last door after appeals are exhausted. For state prisoners, the process depends on the state. In some states the governor can commute a death sentence to life in prison on their own authority. In others, the governor cannot act without a recommendation from an advisory board, and the boards themselves operate under different rules. Pennsylvania requires a unanimous board recommendation. Louisiana requires four of five. In a handful of states, the board makes the final decision without the governor.14Death Penalty Information Center. Clemency Procedures by State
For federal death row inmates, only the President can grant a pardon or commute a sentence. The Department of Justice has moved to restrict when federal capital inmates may file clemency petitions, proposing rules that would bar filings until both direct appeal and the first round of post-conviction review are complete.15United States Department of Justice. The Justice Department Takes Actions to Strengthen the Federal Death Penalty
Individual clemency grants on death row are rare. Broader commutations happen occasionally when a governor clears a state’s death row as a matter of policy, but one-by-one grants in response to a specific petition are uncommon.
Why So Few Women Face a Capital Sentence
Women make up around 2% of death row but commit roughly 10% of homicides.1Death Penalty Information Center. Women Research into gender and capital sentencing has consistently found that prosecutors are less likely to seek the death penalty against women and juries are less likely to return one. A study of California capital cases concluded that stereotypes about women’s capacity for violence make prosecutors and juries reluctant to impose death on female defendants. The same study found that cases involving a female victim produced death sentences at seven times the rate of cases with a male victim.
The women who do end up on death row tend to have been convicted of crimes that jurors found especially shocking: killing children, killing for insurance money, or murders involving prolonged cruelty. Whether the lower rate of capital sentences for women reflects appropriate individualized consideration or an unjustified double standard is one of the more unresolved questions in the research.
Methods of Execution
Lethal injection remains the primary method in every state that authorizes capital punishment, but the backup options have shifted as drug supplies have tightened. Several states now authorize alternatives that inmates may choose or that automatically apply when lethal injection becomes unavailable, including electrocution, nitrogen gas, the firing squad, and lethal gas. Alabama and Louisiana both authorize nitrogen hypoxia alongside lethal injection and electrocution. Idaho is set to make the firing squad its primary method beginning in mid-2026, with lethal injection as the backup.16Death Penalty Information Center. Authorized Methods by State
Protocols do not differ based on the inmate’s gender. Women face the same methods as men in their jurisdictions. Because female executions are rare, however, most institutional experience carrying out these protocols comes from executions of men, and the practical logistics when a woman is scheduled often require adjustments by prison staff.