HUNTSVILLE, Texas—Do not commit a crime anywhere in Texas, especially if you are not willing to pay for it. A woman who was scheduled to pay the ultimate price Tuesday for taking another person’s life has been given more time.
Defense lawyers filed a request to halt the execution of Kimberly McCarthy, who was set to be the first woman put to death in the U. S. in three years. Lawyers argued that McCarthy’s trial jury, which consisted of 11 whites and only one black, is a case of racial discrimination.
Just hours before the 51-year-old was scheduled to die, a Dallas judge decided to postpone the execution until April 3.
McCarthy was sentenced to death for beating, robbing and stabbing her 71-year-old neighbor in 1997. The victim, Dorothy Booth, was a retired college psychology professor.
Authorities said after asking Booth for a cup of sugar, McCarthy brutally attacked the elderly woman with a butcher knife. She even chopped Booth’s finger off just so she could get her wedding ring.
Investigators call McCarthy a serial killer, saying Booth was not the only victim. They believe McCarthy was involved in at least three other murders, all fueled by her crack addiction. She was indicted, but never tried, in those crimes.
According to the Associated Press, blood DNA evidence tied McCarthy to the December 1988 slayings of 81-year-old Maggie Harding and 85-year-old Jettie Lucas. Harding was stabbed and beaten with a meat tenderizer, while Lucas was beaten with both sides of a claw hammer and stabbed.
Despite the savageness of the murder, her lawyers think she doesn’t deserve to die.
“I think when she’s off dope she’s probably a pretty good person,” her lead attorney, Doug Parks, said. “I believe now, as I did then, that in the penitentiary, Kim would be absolutely no danger to anyone.”
People who remember the case feel the opposite.
“She took the most defenseless, the most helpless people, people that trusted her, that she chose to attack,” former Dallas County assistant district attorney Greg Davis told the Associated Press.
Prayers for all those involved.
