A woman inmate in Missouri died by lethal injection Tuesday, becoming the first openly transgender person executed in the United States.
Amber McLaughlin’s fate was sealed earlier Tuesday when Missouri Gov. Mike Parson declined a clemency request. McLaughlin spoke quietly with a spiritual adviser at her side as the fatal dose of pentobarbital was injected.
McLaughlin breathed heavily a couple of times, then shut her eyes. She was pronounced dead a few minutes later.
“I am sorry for what I did,” McLaughlin said in a final, written, statement. “I am a loving and caring person.”
Who is Amber McLaughlin? McLaughlin, 49, was convicted of killing 45-year-old Beverly Guenther on Nov. 20, 2003. Guenther, McLaughlin’s former girlfriend, was raped and stabbed to death in St. Louis County. A judge sentenced McLaughlin to death for the murder in 2006 after a jury was deadlocked on her sentence.
The bigger picture on gender: McLaughlin was one of the few women who have been scheduled for execution since the practice was reinstated in the U.S. in the 1970s. Of the 2,414 people on death rows nationwide as of April 1, 2022, 50 were women, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. There are no known previous cases in which an openly transgender person was executed, according to the anti-execution Death Penalty Information Center.
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Clemency petition cites traumatic childhood, mental health diagnoses
A clemency petition filed to Parson on Dec. 12 by McLaughlin’s attorneys requested a sentence of life without parole in place of a death sentence. The document cites chronic trauma McLaughlin experienced in childhood, including brain damage from fetal alcohol exposure, traumatic brain injuries as a child, abuse she suffered — including tasing and beating — at her adoptive home, and her diagnosed depression and suicide attempts as reasons for clemency.
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