A Virginia woman who used sex and money to persuade two men to kill her husband and her stepson to collect a $US250,000 ($A280,000) life insurance policy is scheduled to be executed in two months - the first US execution of a woman in five years.
A judge has set a September 23 execution date for Teresa Lewis, 41, the only woman on Virginia's death row. She will be the first woman executed in the state in nearly a century.
Lewis offered herself and her 16-year-old daughter for sex to two men who committed the killings. She provided money to buy the murder weapons and stood by while they shot her husband, Julian Clifton Lewis Jr, 51, and stepson Charles J Lewis, 25, in 2002.
Lewis rummaged through her husband's pockets for money while he lay dying and waited nearly an hour before calling 911.
The gunmen, Rodney Fuller and Matthew Shallenberger, were sentenced to life in prison. Shallenberger committed suicide in prison in 2006. Lewis's lawyer, James Rocap III, claims Shallenberger said about two years before his suicide he planned the killings and was using Lewis to get to her husband's money.
Lewis's daughter, Christie Lynn Bean, served five years because she remained silent about the plan.
Lewis would be the first woman executed in the US since Frances Newton died by injection in Texas. Newton shot her husband and two young children to death to collect insurance money.
Lewis would also be the first woman executed in Virginia since 1912, when 17-year-old Virginia Christian died in the electric chair for suffocating her employer.
Women commit about 12 per cent of murders in the US, and few reach the execution chamber.
Of more than 1200 executions since the US Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, only 11 women have been executed. Of more than 3200 inmates on death row nationwide, 53 are women.
Women usually don't commit torture murders, they aren't serial killers and often don't have a history of other violent crimes compared with men on death row, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. They also typically kill someone they know.
Lewis pleaded guilty to capital murder, allowing a judge to determine her sentence. Her lawyers believed she stood a better chance of getting a life term from the judge who had never sentenced anyone to death, than from a jury.
In a 2004 interview with AP, Lewis said she hired the hitmen to escape an abusive relationship. She said she and Shallenberger became lovers and concocted the scheme to murder her husband, an abusive alcoholic.
Rocap said he would appeal her case to the US Supreme Court and would file a clemency request with Governor Bob McDonnell.
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