The US supreme court has refused to block the state of Virginia's first execution of a woman in nearly a century, clearing the way for Teresa Lewis's death by lethal injection tomorrow.
Lewis, 41, was convicted of arranging the deaths of her husband and stepson in October 2002 so she could collect a $250,000 (£159,365) insurance payout. The two men who carried out the murders – one of whom was her lover – received life sentences.
Lewis's lawyers had argued her execution would be unconstitutional because she has a low IQ. Last night two of the three women on the nine-member court, justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, voted to stop the execution but the court made no other comment on its order.
Prosecutors said Lewis deserved the death penalty because she planned the killings in cold blood. Robert McDonnell, the Virginia governor, had refused to stop the execution because, he said, no medical professional had concluded that she was mentally retarded. Lewis's lawyers said they had new evidence that her lover Matthew Shallenberger, who later committed suicide in prison, had manipulated her.
On the decisions made by the supreme court and McDonnell, Lewis's lawyer, James E Rocap said that "a good and decent person is about to lose her life because of a system that is broken".
Authorities in Iran have accused the US and western media of double standards over the case. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in state-run media that the west had run a "heavy propaganda" campaign against the case of an Iranian woman who had been sentenced to be stoned to death for adultery but failed to react with outrage over the scheduled execution of Lewis.
The last woman to be executed in Virginia was 17-year-old Virginia Christian in 1912 for the murder of her employer after she was accused of stealing a gold locket.
There are 53 women on death row in the US. They include Linda Carty, from the Caribbean island of St Kitts, who holds a British passport but has spent most of her adult life in the US. Carty was convicted in Texas, along with three co-defendants, for the abduction and murder of a 25-year-old woman and her three-day-old baby.