On February 3, 1998, Karla Faye Tucker became the first woman to be executed in Texas since the Civil War. She had been sentenced to death after murdering two people with a pickaxe. Her execution followed a prison stay that included a conversion to Christianity and marriage to the prison chaplain. These details of Tucker’s post-conviction life caused many people who had earlier supported capital punishment to question whether it is just. Others viewed the controversy surrounding the Tucker case as a sign of hypocrisy, charging that the morality of capital punishment is only questioned when it involves an attractive, religious woman.

Among those who pleaded for Tucker’s life were religious leaders Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. Robertson wrote that Tucker “is not the same person who committed those heinous ax murders some fourteen-and-a-half years ago. . . . I think to execute...