When emergency services arrived at the home Lisa Coleman shared with her lover they found the bruised and emaciated dead body of nine-year-old Davontae Williams clad only in bandages and a diaper.

Ten years later, Coleman is set to be executed in Texas for her role in the boy’s death. Barring the unlikely success of a last-minute appeal to the supreme court, on Wednesday at 6pm CT, the 38-year-old will become only the 15th woman put to death in the US since capital punishment was restored in 1976.

Though women commit about one in 10 murders in the US they account for only 1% of executions. But the jury in Tarrant County was persuaded to hand down the ultimate punishment after hearing testimony at Coleman’s trial that detailed the gruesome treatment the child suffered at a low-rent apartment complex a short drive south of the Dallas Cowboys’ NFL stadium.

A pediatrician identified more than 250 wounds on his corpse, which weighed less than 36 pounds, the typical weight of a child roughly half his age. He appeared to have been hit with a golf club. A doctor found that injuries to Davontae’s hands, arms and ankles suggested he had been bound repeatedly and concluded that the cause of death was malnutrition with pneumonia. The defence claimed that he accidentally drowned in his own vomit.

Coleman was in a relationship with the boy’s mother, Marcella Williams, and they lived together at the apartment. Davontae was known to Texas child protective services, who had repeatedly investigated Williams and removed him from her custody for a period in the 1990s. But his mother sought to keep him hidden from the authorities and avoided bringing him to a doctor, fearful he would be taken away. First responders were called to the apartment on the morning of 26 July 2004, after a report that he was having trouble breathing.

In June 2006, Coleman was convicted of capital murder despite her lawyers’ attempts to argue her background made her an unsuitable guardian but not a deliberately violent killer. According to court documents she has bipolar disorder and endured a deeply troubled upbringing. Her mother became pregnant with her aged 13 after being raped by a family member. Coleman was physically and sexually abused by family members and grew up in foster care, where she may also have been sexually abused.

Her mother rarely visited her in care and gave her the nickname “Pig”. She was knifed in the back by a cousin aged 11, shortly after she learned through the taunts of several cousins that she was born as a result of rape. By the age of 16 she had used drugs, started drinking and had given birth to a child of her own. Before Davontae’s death, she had a criminal record for burglary and a drug-related offence.

Coleman’s latest appeal hinged on the technical question of whether Davontae could be considered kidnapped inside his home. The legal “aggravator” that raised the charge to capital murder was the court’s conclusion that the child had been confined in his house and kept away from others, meeting the definition of a kidnapping even though there was no element of transportation.

Her lawyers contend that her original legal team failed to properly challenge this counter-intuitive interpretation and that they have uncovered witnesses who say they often saw Davontae outside and that he was not hidden from visitors. As a result, they claim, Coleman did not kidnap the child and is not eligible for the death penalty. The federal fifth circuit appeals court rejected this argument on Tuesday.

“The state singled Lisa out and figured some way to get her the death penalty because she was black, a lesbian and an easy target … it was a slam dunk,” said one of her attorneys, John Stickels. “The facts of the case were horrible,” he said. “We are not asking for her to be released, we are just asking the state to be fair and follow the law.”

Dixie Bersano, one of the trial prosecutors, said in a statement: “This nine-year-old child suffered a horrific death at the hands of Lisa Ann Coleman. Davontae died of malnutrition, a slow and cruel process. There was not an inch on his body that had not been bruised or scarred or injured. The jury assessed the appropriate punishment.”

Coleman will be the third American woman given a lethal injection since September 2010, when Virginia caused an outcry by putting Teresa Lewis to death for hiring hitmen to kill her husband and stepson for an insurance payout. Lewis was only narrowly above the intellectual disability threshold, while the two gunmen were given life sentences. Since then, 159 men have been executed.

Last year, Texas executed Kimberly McCarthy, who had the dubious distinction of being the 500th prisoner put to death by the Lone Star state since it resumed the practice in 1982. Suzanne Basso followed last February, also at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, 70 miles north of Houston.



Only 10.5% of homicides from 1980-2008 were committed by women, according to US Department of Justice statistics. Less than 3% of current Texas death row inmates are female: eight out of 275 people.



“This does feel different going into this execution than other executions,” said Brad Levenson, director of the Austin-based Office of Capital Writs, which since 2010 has worked with indigent defendants sentenced to death in Texas, including Coleman. “We as an office have only had one other female client,” he said. “I don’t know what the statistics bear out, I would only be surmising that perhaps jurors have a more difficult time giving the death penalty to a woman than a man, it also could be that the state doesn’t pursue as vigorously the death penalty in females as males.”

Some 14 women in seven states have been executed in the modern era, compared with 1,374 men in 34 states. “If anything gender might play a role that might be more favourable to women although there’s not really statistical proof of that because there’s relatively few cases,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

“It’s not just whether a murder’s been committed but whether it’s an aggravated murder, usually a murder accompanied by physical abuse or another crime such as robbery, kidnapping or committed by someone with a history of violence. To begin with, women commit fewer murders – and they certainly commit fewer of these murders that society considers more heinous in the sense of being accompanied by other acts. Women are almost always killing someone they know, not a stranger, and it may be their only violent crime in their life.”

Marcella Williams was tried after Coleman, pleaded guilty and was given a life sentence. While the couple’s gender made them unusual suspects in a capital murder case, their contrasting treatment despite ostensibly similar roles is common.

“A lot of crimes involve more than one person and it’s what we call a race to the courthouse or a race to the prosecutor’s office: who will plead guilty and then be the one cooperating with the prosecution? Only one person gets the deal,” said Dieter.