Execution rescheduled for only woman on US federal death row
Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant woman and cut the unborn child from her womb with a kitchen knife, is due to become the first female executed by the United States government in 67 years. (File photo: AFP/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON: The United States government now plans to execute the first female inmate in more than six decades just days before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the death penalty, takes office.
Attorneys for Lisa Montgomery said on Monday (Nov 23) that the Justice Department rescheduled her execution for Jan 12 next year. Biden's inauguration will take place on Jan 20.
A federal judge in Washington had delayed the December execution of Montgomery, 49, because her lawyers tested positive for the COVID-19 after visiting her behind bars. The delay was meant to allow her attorneys to recover from the virus and file a clemency petition on her behalf.
Montgomery’s attorneys, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell, said they both tested positive for COVID-19 after they flew from Nashville, Tennessee, to visit her at the federal prison in Texas where she is incarcerated.
In court papers, they said each round-trip visit from Nashville involved two flights, hotel stays and interaction with airline and hotel staff, as well as prison employees.
With the new execution date, Montgomery would be one of three federal inmates scheduled to die that week. Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs are scheduled to be put to death on Jan 14 and 15 while two other executions are scheduled for December.
The Justice Department resumed federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus. Eight people have been executed since July, more than during the previous half-century, despite waning public support from both Democrats and Republicans for its use.
READ: US asks top court to reinstate Boston marathon bomber's death penalty
READ: US executes only Native American on federal death row
Biden spokesman TJ Ducklo has said the president-elect “opposes the death penalty now and in the future” and would work as president to end its use. But Ducklo did not say whether executions would be paused immediately once Biden takes office.
Montgomery was convicted of killing 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the north-west Missouri town of Skidmore in December 2004. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and then cut her baby girl from her womb with a kitchen knife, authorities said.
Montgomery took the child with her and attempted to pass the girl off as her own, prosecutors said.
Montgomery’s lawyers have argued that their client suffers from serious mental illnesses.
Attorney Sandra Babcock said in a statement: “It is difficult to grasp the extremity of the horrors Lisa suffered from her earliest childhood, including being raped by her stepfather, handed off to his friends for their use, sold to groups of adult men by her own mother and repeatedly gang raped, and relentlessly beaten and neglected. No one intervened to help Lisa, though many knew what was happening to her.”
“No other woman has been executed for a similar crime, because most prosecutors have recognised that it is inevitably the product of trauma and mental illness,” Babcock said. "Executing Lisa Montgomery would be yet another injustice inflicted on a woman who has known a lifetime of mistreatment.”
