Free Republic

OK, the story is all over the Old Media edifice: forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis has become "the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years." Every news outlet from TV and cable, to newspapers, to radio, to the Internet is using this line, this "the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years" line. They are all playing the same narrative. So, here's the question I have. How exactly can anyone be the "first" anything "in five years"? Doesn't the whole "in five years" presuppose that someone else came first? See, the one "five years"...

Her death breaks with traditional queasiness over such punishment for female criminals. Legal scholars say fewer women are given capital sentences because they are less likely to kill.Virginia put to death a 41-year-old woman Thursday night, the first execution of a female in the country in five years and the first in that state for nearly a century. The lethal-injection death of Teresa Lewis, convicted of the 2002 contract killing of her husband and stepson, broke with a tradition of societal "queasiness" about executing women, one legal expert said. It could also psychologically clear the way to carrying out death...

RICHMOND, Va. -- Virginia was moving forward Thursday with its first execution of a woman in nearly a century amid appeals from the European Union and repercussions that reached as far away as Iran. SNIP Teresa Lewis, 41, was scheduled to die by injection at 9 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt for the October 2002 hired killings of her husband and stepson. To procure the hit men, prosecutors said, she used sex, cash and a promised cut of the insurance benefits the killings would reap her. The U.S. Supreme Court and Gov. Bob McDonnell declined to intervene. All...