AFP
Texas, which has put more inmates to death than any other US state, was set Wednesday to execute convicted murderer Lisa Coleman, one of only a handful of women on Death Row.
Coleman, 38, is to be put to death for kidnapping and killing in 2004 the nine-year-old son of her live-in girlfriend.
Barring intervention by the US Supreme Court, her execution is scheduled to take place at 6 pm (2300 GMT) at the state penitentiary in Huntsville.
The child's body bore signs of starvation and abuse, according to court records, which said that the boy was kept bound in the apartment shared by the two women.
Court records showed that the boy died of malnutrition and weighed just 35 pounds (15 kilos).
The boy's mother also was found guilty in his murder and given a lengthy prison sentence.
Coleman, however, also was convicted of kidnapping for having kept him isolated and bound -- adding the aggravating charge of kidnapping that made her conviction in his death a capital crime.
Coleman's attorney, in a Supreme Court appeal filed late Tuesday, denied that the boy had been kidnapped, and insisted that capital punishment never should have been considered for his client.
The lawyer, John Stickels, said witnesses saw the boy playing unrestrained with other children days before he died -- proof, he said, that the kidnapping conviction was wrong.
"She faces the very real possibility of being executed for a non-capital crime," said Stickels, slamming what he called the "arbitrary and capricious infliction of the death penalty" in his client's case.
Coleman's will be the 30th execution in the United States since the beginning of the year, nearly a third of which have been carried out in Texas.
She will also be the 15th woman put to death in the United States since capital punishment was restored in 1976, out of a total of 1,389 executions, according to the non-profit Death Penalty Information Center.
Lisa Coleman
