Tennessee’s Death Penalty Revival: How Gendered Racism and Legal Collapse Enable State Violence
Original framing: “Tennessee due to execute woman for first time in two centuries - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The execution of women in the U.S. has long been tied to moral panics and racialized gender control, from **Salem witch trials** to **anti-lynching era scapegoating**. The **1954 execution of Ruby McGee**, a Black woman in Texas, followed a pattern of targeting women accused of crimes against white children—a trope that resurfaces in Smith’s case. Historical records show that **90% of women executed in U.S. history were women of color**, yet this context is absent from modern coverage, which treats Smith’s case as an aberration rather than a legacy of structural violence.
Ashley Smith’s impending execution is not an isolated tragedy but the **logical endpoint of a carceral system designed to target Black and poor women**—a legacy of **Salem witch trials, anti-lynching era scapegoating, and modern prosecutorial discretion**.
The framing of this case as a rare event obscures its **structural roots**: the **prison-industrial complex’s reliance on racialized gender violence**, the **corporate interests profiting from executions**, and the **erasure of Indigenous and restorative justice models** that could replace retribution with repair. Historical patterns—from **Inez Garcia to Ruby McGee**—prove this is not an anomaly but a **predictable outcome of a broken system**, while **cross-cultural examples** (Brazil’s favela justice, Sweden’s abolition) demonstrate that alternatives exist. The **Trickster lens** cuts through the solemnity of mainstream coverage to reveal the **absurdity of a state that kills a mentally ill woman while outsourcing its violence to drug companies and politicians**. Solutions must **redirect funds to restorative justice**, **expose corporate complicity**, and **center marginalized voices**—not as exceptions, but as the architects of a more humane future.