Saving Jeannace June Freeman: Capital Punishment and the Lesbian-as-Victim in Oregon, 1961-1964
Abstract
In 1961 Jeannace June Freeman, a young, white, butch lesbian became the first woman sentenced to death in Oregon after she and her lover brutally murdered her lover’s young children. Despite the horrific nature of her crime and the press’s initial demonization of her, Freeman became the central symbol in the movement to abolish capital punishment in Oregon in the early 1960s. In 1964, while Freeman waited on death row, Oregonians voted to overturn the state’s death penalty and the governor commuted her sentence to life in prison. Looking closely at coverage of Freeman’s case in more than 300 articles, editorials, and letters published in ten of Oregon’s daily newspapers, this article demonstrates that it was in part because of Freeman’s unconventional gender presentation and her homosexuality that so many Oregonians saw her as a victim capable of reformation. Though Freeman’s masculinity and lesbianism were initially portrayed in the news and in her trial as proof of her responsibility for the murders, they later came to serve as evidence of her physical and emotional “damage”—her history of incestuous abuse and her neglect in state reform school. This news coverage both reflected and perpetuated a broader discourse that conflated lesbianism, childhood sexual abuse, and juvenile delinquency. While historians have focused on notions of lesbians as predatory and dangerous at midcentury, Freeman’s story reveals that a cultural understanding of lesbians as victimized was taking shape in this period as well.
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