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A woman who was convicted of the murder of her stepdaughter by famine was sentenced to death by lethal injection. Tiffany Moss, 36, showed no emotion on Tuesday morning while a jury from Gwinnett County, Georgia, had pronounced the death sentence for the murder of 10-year-old Emani Moss. years, in 2013.
On Monday, Moss was convicted of all counts including murder, child cruelty and attempting to conceal Emani 's death by burning him in a garbage can. The girl weighed only 32 pounds when she died.
Moss is represented at trial and has not put up any defense. She made no opening statement or closing argument and did not summon any witnesses, claiming that she hoped God would bring it to an end.
Her husband Eman Moss – Emani's biological father – is serving a life sentence without parole for his role in the crime, after pleading guilty to the murder of a crime in 2015 in exchange his testimony against his wife.
His death sentence was the first in Georgia in more than five years.
At trial, prosecutors painted a damning picture of Moss, who allegedly kept his young daughter-in-law in a bedroom in their apartment in Lawrenceville, leaving her slowly starving.
A medical examiner described how Emani died without food or water and lived in bed because she had become too weak to move.
Authorities say that she weighed only 32 pounds at her death.
Prosecutors highlighted SMS sent by Tiffany Moss to her husband Eman at the time of his death.
At least twice, Moss sent her husband photos of the meals she had prepared for him and his two children shared by the couple.
Prosecutors said it probably took several weeks for Emani to starve.
After the girl's death, Tiffany and Eman Moss put their emaciated body in a garbage can and set it on fire.
Their other two children, whose age was not revealed, were with them when they tried to get rid of the body.
Gwinnett District Attorney Danny Porter urged the jury to choose the death sentence for Tiffany Moss, rather than life without parole.
"She has shown you too much of her cruelty. There will always be that dark side waiting to come out, "he said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Porter called Moss "evil mother-in-law" in her opening statement, saying the case was "a Cinderella story that went terribly wrong".
When asked by the judge whether, prior to her sentence, she wanted to tell the jury something to explain her life or circumstances, Moss only replied "No".
Late Monday, a few hours after the beginning of the sentencing deliberations, the jurors asked Gwinnett Superior Court Judge George Hutchinson to return home to "sleep on" the decision on at the penalty after being found in a stalemate.
The jury of six men and six women accepted the death penalty after resuming its deliberations at 9 am Tuesday.
Hutchinson interviewed the jurors individually to ensure that their decision was unanimous.
Moss is now the only woman on death row in Georgia and would become the third to be executed in the state's history when the sentence is executed.
— Daily mail
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