The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday that an Oklahoma woman deserved a review of whether unlawful gender stereotyping put her on death row. The justices found that statements about the woman’s sex life and her apparent “failings as a mother and wife” could have been so prejudicial that the state violated the due process clause and rendered the trial fundamentally unfair, Courthouse News reports. The high court vacated a 10th Circuit Court of Appeals’ decision to deny the woman’s appeal, finding that, despite no federal law banning the introduction of irrelevant evidence — which the justices said they would review — the appellate court should have considered whether a jurist would deem the trial unfair. The justices remanded the case to the 10th Circuit for review. Justices Clarence Thomas, and Neil Gorsuch dissented and said the majority’s decision wrongfully generalizes a “one-sentence aside” of Payne v. Tennessee, which held that the due process clause protects against unduly prejudicial evidence. Thomas and Gorsuch also pushed against the majority's description of the record, saying the state had "overwhelming evidence" that the woman had participated in her husband's murder. Brenda Andrew faces execution for the 2001 murder of her estranged husband, Robert Andrew. Despite a confession from her boyfriend, prosecutors put Andrew’s character as a mother and wife on trial to convince a jury to sentence her to death for a crime she says she didn't commit.
“By stripping Ms. Andrew of her humanity as a whole person, the state instead offered the jury an archetype of a ‘slut’ and depraved adulterer who dressed in ‘improper’ clothing, did not display feminine emotion, kept a ‘filthy’ home, and was a bad mother,” Andrew’s attorneys wrote to the high court. “And the state explicitly told the jury that Ms. Andrew’s deviance from ‘the rest of us’ and failure to cry was a reason to condemn her to die.” A retired federal judge said the Oklahoma County district attorney’s office weaponized gender bias to poison proceedings against a female defendant. Judge Mark Bennett urged the justices to review Andrew’s case to eradicate such prosecutorial tactics from courtrooms. Bennett — joined by a nonprofit organization, 17 law professors and domestic violence researchers and advocates — submitted research demonstrating how the prejudicial evidence in Andrew’s case tainted her trial, making it a referendum on her femininity and morality instead of her guilt. “Any jury subjected to this drumbeat of sexualizing evidence would come to see Ms. Andrew not as one of their peers, entitled to fair and impartial treatment, but as a one-dimensional and callous seductress, undeserving of their compassion,” Bennett and his colleagues wrote in an amicus brief.
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