A Maricopa County jury today sentenced Sammantha Allen to death for killing her 10-year-old cousin, Ame Deal, in 2011.
Allen will join only two other Arizona women in the custody of the Arizona Department of Corrections who have been sentenced to die.
No woman has been executed in Arizona since Eva Dugan was decapitated in a botched hanging in 1930.
A look at the other two inmates:
Shawna Forde, a member of the anti-immigrant Minutemen American Defense Corps. and a couple of her male comrades murdered 29-year-old Raul Flores and his 9-year-old daughter, Bresenia — both U.S. citizens — during a home invasion on May 30, 2009, in Pima County.
The group pretended to be immigration officials as they forced their way into the home, looking for drugs and cash.
Forde didn't pull the trigger on the Floreses, but a jury agreed that she did orchestrate the whole thing.
Wendy Andriano was sentenced to death in 2004 after she killed her husband in Ahwatukee. The prosecutor in that case was Juan Martinez, the same prosecutor in the Arias case, and there were some similarities between the murders. The murder itself was pretty brutal — Andriano put pesticide in her husband's soup, then hit him over the head with a barstool 23 times before sticking a knife in his neck, according to a press account from the time.
Andriano's defense was that she'd suffered a lifetime of mental and physical abuse at the hands of her husband. She claimed the poison was assisted suicide for her husband, who was terminally ill with cancer. The rest of the attack, she reportedly explained, came after she admitted being unfaithful to her husband, and claimed he attacked her. The jury bought none of that, landing her on death row.
Stuart Warner contributed to this article.
