Maria Barbella was an Italian immigrant to the U.S. and a seamstress who worked in a sweatshop. Her lover, Domenico Cataldo, promised her marriage and an escape from factory life. When she left her family for him, however, Cataldo rejected her; betrayed and furious, Barbella slit his throat. She was the first woman sentenced to the electric chair, then only recently invented. Convicted of murder, sentenced to die, she awaited a retrial as her defenders rallied an appeal. She was aquitted in the second trial. This exploration of the events, written a hundred years after the fact, is amplified by the author`s own history: her grandmother was one of Barbella`s advocates.