Name: Women on Death Row V
Genre: Documentary
Rating: 7.6
Cast: Genevieve Levin

Women who kill are few and far between, and usually the crime is domestic in nature. There are no domestic crimes here, not in the true sense of the word. As can be seen from its title, this documentary is one of a series. 

Among others we learn about and hear from double killer Wanda Jean Allen, the odious Nadine Smith, the evil Marilyn Plantz, and a woman whose crimes beggar belief, Judy Buenoano.

At one point, the first three were all on death row in the same prison; Allen is the best known of probably all the women featured here, although she is far from the most notorious. She was executed in January 2001 for the cold-blooded murder of her lesbian lover. As she had a previous conviction for manslaughter – shooting a flatmate dead – this was well deserved. Allen had been sentenced to a paltry four years for this first crime; she made history by becoming the first black woman to be executed in the United States since 1954. Most attention was devoted to her low IQ; it is truly amazing how many otherwise intelligent people think it is shocking that a retard should be executed under any circumstances. Allen could drive a car, she also held down a job, so how retarded could she have been?

Plantz was a married woman with a hard working husband; they had first a daughter and then a son, ostensibly a perfect marriage. Her husband was only 6 years older than her, but she started going out clubbing behind his back while he worked the night shift, then decided to recruit her teenage paramour and another youth to murder him for the insurance money. He suffered a truly horrible death, being battered with baseball bats until the assassins thought he was dead, only he wasn't. They took the victim's body out into the country in his own truck and set it on fire, then saw him climb out of the vehicle.

We hear from the brother and sisters of the victim, and from the Assistant Attorney General who asks the rhetorical question, if this isn't a death penalty case, what is? It didn't take long for the police to join up the dots. William Bryson was executed in July 2000, thirteen years after the murder; the other defendant took a plea in return for a life sentence. Plantz was executed May 1, 2001. 

Not all the women featured in this hour and a half long documentary were executed, but none deserved it more than Judy Buenoano, who in March 1998 became the first and last woman to die in Florida's electric chair. Buenoano was a black widow, that rarest of rare breeds, a female serial killer who murders for money. Her victims included her husband and her own eldest son, the latter of whom she first crippled by poisoning him, and then drowned in a staged accident, again in order to claim on insurance.

Opinions herein are divided as to the merits of the death penalty, but none of the profiled murders has any real mitigation, so the viewer should lose no sleep on their perpetrators' accounts.

The documentary is a form of non-fiction storytelling that aims to present factual information, insights, and perspectives on real-world subjects, events, issues, or people. Documentaries can cover a wide range of topics, including history, science, culture, social issues, nature, biographies, and more.

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Women on Death Row V

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