[2] Her final appeals and the last three months of her life were chronicled by filmmaker Liz Garbus in the documentary The Execution of Wanda Jean (2002).

Nevertheless, prosecutors cut a deal with Allen, and she received a four-year sentence[2] in exchange for a guilty plea to a manslaughter charge.

Seven years after the death of Dedra Pettus, Allen was living with her girlfriend Gloria Jean Leathers.

On December 2, 1988, Leathers, 29, was shot in front of The Village Police Department in Oklahoma City.

Leathers was buried at Green Acres Memorial Gardens Cemetery, located in Sperry, Oklahoma.

Evidence that Leathers had a history of violent conduct, and that she had stabbed a woman to death in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1979, was central to the self-defense argument at Allen's trial.

In a 1991 affidavit, her defense lawyer David Presson stated that after the trial he learned that when Allen was 15 years old, her IQ was measured at 69, placing her "just within the upper limit of the classification of mental retardation" according to the psychologist who analyzed her and that an examining doctor had recommended a neurological assessment because she manifested symptoms of brain damage.

The lawyer stated, "I did not search for any medical or psychological records or seek expert assistance for use at the trial."

A psychologist conducted a comprehensive evaluation of Allen in 1995 and found clear and convincing evidence of cognitive and sensory-motor deficits and brain dysfunction possibly linked to an adolescent head injury.

[2] Keating who considered giving Allen a stay based on the narrow issue of whether the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board had enough information regarding her education.

Allen's attorneys have pointed to her score, a 69, on an IQ test she took in the 1970s, arguing she was in the range of intellectual disability.

Prosecutors said Allen testified during the penalty phase of her trial that she had graduated from a high school and received a medical assistant certificate from a college, but they[clarification needed] said Allen dropped out of high school at 16 and never finished course work in the medical assistant program.

The Reverend Robin Meyers, who served as a spiritual adviser to Allen, is quoted as saying, I always suspected that Wanda's renunciation of lesbianism had more to do with helping to revamp herself in the most palatable way for her clemency and appeal processes.