cancel2 2022
Canceled
It is cases like this that dismay foreign observers of the US justice system, how is it conceivable that she is executed whilst the contract kilers were not?
A Virginia grandmother has been put to death for plotting the murders of her husband and stepson - the first woman to be executed in the US for five years.
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Teresa Lewis was given a lethal injection at 2am BST at the Greensville Correctional Centre in southern Virginia while supporters and relatives of the victims watched. Just outside the prison, a group opposed to the death penalty rang a bell and prayed as Lewis went to her death.
She is the first woman in almost 100 years to be executed in Virginia. More than 7,300 appeals to stop the execution had been made to Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell but he refused to intervene in the case. The US Supreme Court had already rejected her request for a stay of execution.
Sky News' US correspondent Greg Milam has been outside the Greensville Correctional Centre in southern Virginia.
He said: "We have heard from some of the witnesses, four official witnesses who were inside that chamber describing the look of fear, the look of terror on the face of Teresa Lewis as she was taken into that execution chamber.
"Her lawyer gave a very emotional speech after the execution in which he said he hoped what had happened here would make America look again at a badly broken system that put someone to death when there are such questions about their mental capacity."
Lewis pleaded guilty to hiring two men to murder her husband and stepson at the family's home in October 2002 so that she could collect £200,000 in life insurance.
But campaigners had argued that she was "borderline mentally retarded" and that assessments of her IQ as being between 70 and 72 made the execution unconstitutional.
Lewis admitted she left the door of the family trailer open in 2002 so the two could enter and shoot her husband and his 25-year-old son.
All three pleaded guilty but Shallenberger and Fuller were sentenced to life while Lewis received the death penalty as the mastermind of the killings.
But her supporters argued that she had a personality disorder, was addicted to prescription drugs and was manipulated by the more intelligent Shallenberger.
And they questioned why she should be executed when the two men who actually carried out the murder were handed life without parole.
Her lawyers had pointed to a letter from Shallenberger, who killed himself in jail in 2006, in which he claimed full responsibility for the murder plot and suggested he pushed Lewis into it.
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