Final appeal fails to save the life of woman on death row

A LAST-MINUTE appeal to spare the life of a 41-year-old murderess was rejected yesterday, dooming her to become the first woman to be executed in the state of Virginia for nearly a century, despite claims that she suffers from borderline retardation.

Teresa Lewis is due to die by lethal injection tomorrow, eight years after she was convicted of hiring two hitmen to kill her husband and her stepson as they slept.

Death penalty opponents, mental health advocates and human rights campaigners argue that Lewis has diminished mental faculties and a behavioural dependency disorder, diagnosed by three forensic psychologists, which meant she could not have masterminded the murder-for-hire plot. As she prepares to die, they complain, the men who manipulated her into the killing - and pulled the trigger - were given only life sentences.

"We oppose execution in every case, but I do think there are some compelling facts in Teresa Lewis's case that underscore some of the fundamental unfairness with which capital punishment is administered in our country," Steve Northup, a director of Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, told The Scotsman.

"The judge who sentenced her basically regarded her as a monster and said she was the person who orchestrated the entire act, but she was no more capable of doing that than my ten-year-old grandson."

The governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, yesterday turned down pleas to commute her sentence. Lewis will be the first woman put to death in Virginia since 1912 and the first in the US for five years.

Women represent less than 2 per cent of the 3,200 inmates on Death Row nationwide. Only 11 have been executed since the US reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

Lewis, who lived in a trailer park with her husband Julian, and his son, Charles, 25, admitted hiring Matthew Shallenberger, 22, and Rodney Fuller, 19, two men who she met at a WalMart superstore, to kill them.

On 30 October, 2002, she left the door of her trailer open, allowing the pair to creep in and shoot the men as they slept.

Within days, it is said, Lewis sought guidance on how to cash in her stepson's $350,000 life insurance policy.

While it was Shallenberger and Fuller who fired the shotguns, Lewis was "the head of this serpent", the judge concluded.

Yet Lewis's lawyers say it was Shallenberger, with whom Lewis had been having an affair, who was the true mastermind. He harboured ambitions of joining the mafia as an assassin.

"From the moment I met her I knew she was someone who could be easily manipulated. From the moment I met her I had a plan for how I could use her to get some money. Killing Julian and Charles Lewis was entirely my idea," Shallenberger is said to have revealed during a prison interview in 2004.Shortly after he was sentenced, Shallenberger - who committed suicide in 2006 - also wrote to a girlfriend: "I figured why go to New York for $20,000 a hit when I could do just one and make $350,000 off of it."

In IQ tests, Lewis gained a score of 72. The Supreme Court ruled in 2002 that mentally disabled people cannot be executed.

As she whiled away her final hours in Greensville Correctional Centre in Jarratt, Virginia, Lewis said: "I'm a little nervous. I'm also a little scared. But I am peaceful because I've got Jesus with me."