USA - Federal. Judge removes 1 of 2 women on federal death row: Angela Johnson, 48, white

Judge removes 1 of 2 women on federal death row. U.S. District Judge Mark Bennett ruled that lawyers for Angela Johnson, 48, white, failed to present evidence about her troubled mental state that could have spared her from capital punishment. Judge Bennett said her defense lawyers were "alarmingly dysfunctional" during the 2005 trial that made her the 1st woman to be sentenced to death in the federal system since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the punishment in 1976. Attorney General Eric Holder and aides must determine within 60 days whether to appeal or continue seeking the death penalty for the 48-year-old woman. Johnson was convicted in 2005 for the drug-related slayings of 3 adults and 2 children in northern Iowa. She was sentenced to death in 4 of the killings and given a life sentence for the 5th. Johnson and boyfriend Dustin Honken committed the murders to thwart a federal investigation that threatened to end Honken's reign as one of the Midwest's largest methamphetamine kingpins. After separate trials, jurors sentenced Honken to death for the two children's murders while Johnson was sentenced to death on four counts. The bodies of the victims - drug dealers-turned-government witnesses Terry DeGeus and Greg Nicholson; Nicholson's girlfriend, Lori Duncan; and Duncan's daughters, Kandi, 10, and Amber, 6 - were found in shallow graves near Mason City in 2000. They were discovered after Johnson, serving time on drug charges, sketched out a locator map to a jailhouse informant.