The state of Virginia executed forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis last night despite claims that she was borderline mentally retarded with an IQ of seventy-two. Lewis is the first woman to be executed in Virginia in nearly a century and the first woman to be executed anywhere in the United States since 2005. She was convicted of plotting with her young lover to kill her husband and stepson for insurance money. Supporters of Lewis had urged for her life to be spared because she was borderline mentally retarded, with the intellectual ability of about a thirteen-year-old. Teresa Lewis’s attorney Jim Rocap spoke after the execution.

Jim Rocap: “Tonight the machinery of death in Virginia extinguished the beautiful, childlike and loving human spirit of Teresa Lewis. For her family and friends, for her fellow inmates at Fluvanna, for her thousands of supporters in Virginia, the United States and around the world, her death is a tragic loss.”