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Lisa Jo Chamberlin’s life has always been a tangle of drug use, abuse, and extreme violence. Her mother drank and used Sudafed heavily during her pregnancy. As a result, Chamberlin was born with Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD), a group of medical conditions, including poor reasoning and judgment skills, learning disabilities, and intellectual disability, that occur when a fetus is exposed to alcohol.People with FASD are more vulnerable to manipulation by others. For Chamberlin, that vulnerability led to a death sentence.

The 45 women on death row across the country make up 2 percent of the total number of Americans sentenced to death. The vast majority of women behind bars have experienced abuse before arrest. Ninety-six percent of women on death row had experienced gender-based violence before arrest, 80 percenthave intellectual or psychosocial disabilities, and 90 percent have no prior conviction for a violent felony. Chamberlin checked all of these boxes.

As a child, she suffered constant physical and sexual abuse from her father, her mother, her stepfather, her brother, and even her fourth-grade teacher. Her mother beat her with whatever was on hand, sometimes whipping her with a wooden spoon until it broke. When she was six, her 11-year-old brother put her into a closet with three neighborhood children, instructing them to touch her sexually. He also sexually abused her for years. Chamberlin told her mother, who dismissed her complaints.

When she was 12, Chamberlin began using drugs to numb the constant violence and abuse.

As an adult, her boyfriends used her substance dependency to exert control. They also physically and sexually abused her. Roger Gillett, who would become her co-defendant, strangled her, attempted to drown her, and raped her. He ordered her to move with him from Oregon, where her family lived, first to Kansas and then Mississippi in 2004. That was where Gillett killed two people.

Tennessee Attempted to Execute a Sexual Assault Victim

Now 53, Chamberlin is the sole woman on Mississippi’s death row. If her appeals fail, she will be the first woman the state executes since 1944.

“In capital cases, women who have experienced some of the most extreme forms of gender-based violence and oppression are also among those who have received the least support from the legal system, from their communities, from their families, and from society,” Sandra Babcock, founder and director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, told Truthout. “There are two dynamics: One is that these women are among the most damaged and vulnerable survivors to become involved in the criminal legal system. But their experiences of violence and trauma go unrecognized by the legal system when they are charged with a capital crime.”

A Trial Rife With Gender Stereotypes

In Mississippi, Chamberlin and Gillett stayed with Gillett’s cousin, Vernon Hulett, and his cousin’s girlfriend, Linda Heintzelman. At first, they all got along. Then, after an auto accident between the two couples, they hatched a plan for Heintzelman to report the accident, collect insurance, and split it with Gillett and Chamberlin.

Heintzelman never filed the insurance claim, leading to tension between the two couples. When their hosts suggested that they move out, Gillett tortured and killed them. He and Chamberlin then placed their bodies into a freezer, loaded it into Heintzelman’s truck, and drove to an abandoned Kansas farm owned by Gillett’s grandfather.

There, police conducted a drug raid, arresting both. They later found the freezer and charged the couple with the deaths of Hulett and Heintzelman.

The pair were tried separately. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.

Chamberlin’s trial was marked by demonizing gender stereotypes. The prosecutor painted her as the mastermind behind the murders. He introduced testimony about Chamberlin’s sex life, including testimony from two jailhouse informants. Jailhouse informants’ testimonies, commonly motivated by law enforcement, are inherently unreliable and have been the leading cause in 46 percent of death row exonerations. Even the Mississippi Supreme Court recognized the problematic nature of relying on jailhouse informants, stating in 1989, “The testimony of jail-house informants, or ‘snitches,’ is becoming an increasing problem in this state, as well as throughout the American criminal justice system.”

“It is much easier to conclude that this is simply an evil person, that this is not someone who is herself damaged, who is herself a crime victim.”

“It is much easier to conclude that this is simply an evil person, that this is not someone who is herself damaged, who is herself a crime victim.”

Nonetheless, the informants’ testimony was not contested. One of the informants, Marsha Petrofsky, already on probation for five fraudulent checks, had been jailed for arson. A year after........

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