Three death row inmates awaited the results of Oregon’s 1964 vote on ending capital punishment. Hardly any attention was paid to two of the inmates, both of whom were white men. But a young white woman, sentenced to death for her role in the murders of two children, became the focus of the abolitionist campaign.
Scholar Lauren Jae Gutterman explores how convicted murderer Jeannace June Freeman came to “serve as such a powerful symbol of capital punishment’s injustice.”
“Freeman’s case attracted so much attention not only because she had the distinction of being the first woman to receive the death sentence in Oregon’s history—at a mere twenty years old—but also because she was found guilty of an exceptionally brutal and sexually sensational crime.”
Initially, Freeman was the wrong kind of young white woman. She was a working-class butch lesbian, tattooed-up and dressed, in the words of the Oregonian, in “mannish” attire. At the time, “masculine” lesbians were typically seen as threatening, but Freeman became an exception—but only after her trial and conviction. As her execution neared, she began to be portrayed as a victim: sexual abuse and societal neglect had forced her into lesbianism.
Freeman and her lover, Gertrude Nunez Jackson, were convicted of killing Jackson’s two young children, Martha and Larry, in 1961. Jackson plead guilty to Martha’s murder and was a witness against Freeman, who was charged with Larry’s murder. The prosecution portrayed Freeman as “almost inhuman,” a monstrous “pseudovampire” who brainwashed the unwilling Jackson. Freeman was sentenced to die and Jackson was sentenced to life—a result that led some to charge Freeman was being executed because of her lesbianism.
“Freeman’s masculinity and lesbianism were initially portrayed in the news and in court as proof of her greater guilt in the murders,” Gutterman notes. But, a year after Freeman’s conviction, there was a shift in the discourse and rhetoric. Her “gender and sexual deviance began to serve as evidence of her physical and emotional ‘damage’—her history of childhood sexual abuse and her neglect in the state’s reform school.”
Freeman’s harrowing youth “both reflected and perpetuated a broader mid-century discourse that conflated lesbianism, childhood sexual abuse, and juvenile delinquency.” Her crime and her proximity to execution “drew an otherwise unimaginable degree of public attention to the abuse and neglect she had suffered, fostering understandings of lesbians—especially young, white lesbians—as injured.”
In this emerging discourse, lesbianism was still deviant, but interpreted in a more sympathetic way.