Tucker took part in a crime of extraordinary brutality. A recitation of the details of the crime she committed makes the reader bloodthirsty for revenge. But the case hangs on her sex. The last time Texas executed a woman was in the mid-1860s. The last time anybody executed a woman was 1984, in North Carolina.
Murders committed by women are dramatically fewer.
Still, there are seven women on Texas' death row right now. Now here are a couple of considerations that are politically fretful. The politically correct position is that men and women are equal in respect of everything that bears on civil, or indeed military, life. What this appears to tell us is that no latitudinarian consideration of any kind is to be given to Tucker's being a woman. Well, not exactly.