Karla Faye Tucker

Karla Faye Tucker (November 18, 1959 – February 3, 1998) was an American woman sentenced to death for killing two people with a pickaxe during a burglary. She was the first woman to be executed in the United States since Velma Barfield in 1984 in North Carolina and the first in Texas since Chipita Rodriguez in 1863. She was convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and executed by lethal injection after 14 years on death row. Due to her gender and widely publicized conversion to Christianity, she inspired an unusually large national and international movement that advocated the commutation of her sentence to life without parole, a movement that included a few foreign government officials.