Borderline mentally retarded woman set to be executed in Virginia today

Teresa Lewis, whom friends describe as ‘childlike’ and ‘barely capable of buying food at the shop’, was accused of masterminding a murder plot and sentenced to die by lethal injection.

Virginia’s governor, Robert M. McDonnell, who has supported legislation to expand the use of the death penalty, branded Lewis ‘the head of this serpent’, denying her request for clemency on Friday. But Lewis is far from the ‘mastermind’ killer McDonnell suggests.

With an IQ score of just 72, Lewis has the intellectual ability of a 13 year old. If her IQ score had been two points lower, the U.S. Supreme Court would have deemed her execution unconstitutionally ‘cruel and unusual’. Instead, barring a last-minute stay from the Supreme Court, Lewis will become the first woman to be executed in Virginia for nearly a century.

Lewis has admitted her part in a murder plot to kill her husband and stepson, Julian and Charles Lewis respectively, to collect insurance money in 2002. Her co-conspirators, gunmen Rodney Fuller and Matthew Shallenberger, were spared the death penalty and instead sentenced to life imprisonment. There is evidence to suggest that it was in fact the latter of these men who masterminded the murder plot. Shallenberger, who wanted money to move to New York and set up as a drug dealer, writes in a letter to a former girlfriend in 2003 that he found in Lewis ‘exactly what I was looking for’: a dupe to help him establish himself in the criminal underworld of New York.

Lewis, a mother and grandmother of 41, has expressed deep remorse for her ‘heinous crimes’. Over the past seven years of her imprisonment, her faith has deepened and she is said to have been a model inmate and source of support for her fellow prisoners. Richard Dieter, executive of the Death Penalty Information Centre, a Washington research group which opposes capital punishment, predicted that Lewis’s execution would leave a ‘bad taste with a lot of people who even support the death penalty’.

He suggested that Lewis’s gender, far from encouraging leniency, had worked against her, with Virginia’s attorney general stressing the fact that she had had sexual relations with co-defendant, Shallenberger, and was thus somehow dishonoured.

"When women cross a certain line and are seen as going outside their societal role, they are considered particularly evil and dangerous," Dieter explained.

Little surprise, then, that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is accusing the US media, who have been openly condemnatory of Iran’s death ruling for adultery of 43 year old Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, of flagrant hypocrisy…