In the past 82 years, 16 women were singled out to receive Florida's ultimate punishment: the death penalty.
These women killed their husbands. Or they killed cops. Half a dozen of them murdered multiple people. Some killed during robberies and murder-for-hire schemes. One tortured and killed her young son.
This month, prosecutors announced they are seeking the death penalty for Casey Anthony, an Orange County mother charged with first-degree murder in the death of her daughter, Caylee Marie.
With Florida's death row history, experts say prosecutors face an uphill challenge in convicting Anthony, sending her to death row and keeping her there.
Of the 16 women initially ordered to die by state execution, the lives of 13 have been spared when their sentences were vacated or commuted to life on appeal.
Death penalty expert Victor Streib said there are fewer women on death row across the country because fewer women commit murder. Only about one in 10 murders is committed by a woman.
Those killings usually don't rise to the level of death penalty cases - ones considered especially heinous, ones committed by violent habitual offenders or those committed during another crime, said Streib, a law professor at Ohio Northern University in Ada, Ohio.
Society sees women as the "source of life," Streib said, and there is a general urge to protect them. Juries could be biased, finding it harder to condemn a woman to death than a man. But there are exceptions, he conceded.
Florida has executed two: Judy "The Black Widow" Buenoano in 1998 and Aileen Wuornos in 2002.
Florida currently has 392 death-row inmates.
Only one is a woman.
Why waste the money? Sentence the crazy cow to life in prison (it's actually cheaper). And spend the money that would be spent on dozens of appeals on something else. And she would have to spend the rest of her life missing her partying days, because we all know she isn't missing her daughter.
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