America’s first transgender hanged

The United States executed Amber McLaughlin, the first transgender person to be executed in the country, on Tuesday, as the governor of the state of Missouri, Mike Parson, did not avoid it.

McLaughlin, a man named Scott McLaughlin, was convicted of the 2003 rape and murder of Beverly Guenther, but petitioned Governor Parsons for clemency, claiming brain damage and childhood trauma. Finally, it has been accomplished.

He killed his ex

On November 20, 2003, 45-year-old Beverly Guenther, who worked in Earth City, Missouri, was abducted outside her office. She was stabbed and raped, and her lifeless body was left in a patch of land on the banks of the Mississippi River.

About a month ago, a 30-year-old man identified as Scott McLaughlin was accused of burglarizing Gunther’s Moscow Mills home. The two remained a couple until that summer, but Guenther told people he knew he was so scared of McLaughlin that he filed for a restraining order.

“The investigation recognized McLaughlin’s genuine remorse, and every professional who evaluated him in the years since the trial has,” the petition to the governor said.

McLaughlin did not initiate any legal process to change his name or begin a physical, so he stayed at the all-male Potosi Correctional Center near San Luis.

The condemned woman was “conclusively diagnosed with borderline intellectual disability” and “universally diagnosed with brain damage and fetal alcohol syndrome,” she explains in her leniency petition.

The Death Penalty Information Center – which is against the death penalty – highlighted McLaughlin as “the first trans person to be assigned an execution date in the United States.”

In addition, he recalled that the jury did not unanimously approve the death penalty, a necessary condition in most states that execute prisoners.

“Missouri law considers a non-unanimous jury to be a deadlocked jury, so a rule was used that allowed the judge to impose his own sentence,” they recalled, adding, “The judge relied on circumstances rejected by the jury. McLaughlin should have been sentenced to death.”

Many political and civil society figures called for McLaughlin’s execution to be overturned, recalling that he was abandoned by his mother and repeatedly beaten by his adoptive father and the protagonist of “several suicide attempts”.

However, Amber McLaughlin was eventually executed. In a final written statement, he vowed “I am sorry for what I have done” and “I am a loving person”. After the lethal injection, he took a couple of deep breaths and closed his eyes. She died within minutes.

A database on the website of the Information Center Against the Death Penalty shows that 1,558 people have been executed since the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-1970s. All but 17 of those sentenced to death were men.

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