Karla Faye Tucker (November 18, 1959 – February 3, 1998) was the first woman to be
executed in the United States
since 1984, and the first in Texas
since 1863. She was convicted of murder in Texas in 1984 and put to death fourteen years later. Because of her gender and widely publicized conversion to
Christianity, she inspired an unusually large national and international movement advocating the
commutation of her sentence to life imprisonment, a movement that included a few foreign government officials.