NewsRescue
According to officials, a transgender woman convicted of murder was executed late Tuesday, January 3, in the first such execution in the United States.
Amber McLaughlin, 49, died shortly before 7 p.m. local time at the Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, according to a state prison department statement.
McLaughlin died by lethal injection, according to local news station Fox2now.
McLaughlin was the country’s first transgender person of either sex to be executed, as well as the first person to die by capital punishment this year. She was convicted of murdering a former girlfriend in 2003 in a St. Louis suburb before transitioning.
McLaughlin stalked the victim so much that the ex-partner sought a restraining order.
McLaughlin waited for the woman, Beverly Guenther, as she left work on the day of the murder.
Guenther was raped and killed with a kitchen knife. Her remains were discovered near the Mississippi River.
In 2006, a jury found McLaughlin guilty of murder but couldn’t agree on how to punish her.
The death penalty was imposed by the trial judge. Such intervention is legal in both Missouri and Indiana.
Her lawyers asked Governor Mike Parson to commute McLaughlin’s sentence to life in prison, citing the fact that she was not sentenced to death by a jury.
“The death sentence now under consideration does not come from the conscience of the community, but from a single judge,” her lawyers argued in their clemency application.
They also claimed McLaughlin had a difficult childhood and suffered from mental health issues.
High-profile supporters of her cause included two Missouri members of the United States House of Representatives, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver.
They claimed in a letter to the Governor that McLaughlin’s adoptive father beat her with a baton and even tasered her.
“Along with this horrendous abuse, she was also silently struggling with her identity, grappling with what we now understand to be gender dysphoria,” according to the letter. The condition describes people who believe their sex at birth and gender identity are incompatible.
Nonetheless, McLaughlin was executed.
According to press reports, McLaughlin began her gender transition in recent years but remained on Missouri’s death row in the men’s section.
