Execution of only woman on federal death row rescheduled after COVID delay
The Justice Department plans to execute the first woman in nearly seven decades just days before President-Elect Joe Biden is inaugurated, a controversial decision that had been temporarily halted after two of her attorneys contracted COVID-19.
Convicted killer Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant woman and cut the baby from the victim’s womb with a kitchen knife, is set to be put to death on Jan. 12, a month after her original Dec. 8 execution date, her legal team said Monday.
A federal judge had granted a request by defense attorneys last week to delay the proceeding until next year because two of them were battling serious coronavirus symptoms and were “functionally incapacitated” to complete a clemency petition on Montgomery’s behalf. The pair, Kelley Henry and Amy Harwell, tested positive for the virus after flying to Texas last month to visit the woman in prison, they told a court in Washington, D.C.
Montgomery, 52, joins three other federal death row inmates who are set to be executed within 10 days before Biden, who opposes the death penalty, takes office. The former vice president has vowed to end capital punishment at the federal level and encourage states to follow suit.
“Since 1973, over 160 individuals in this country have been sentenced to death and were later exonerated,” Biden said in a tweet responding to the Justice Department’s announcement last year that it would resume federal executions.
“Because we can’t ensure that we get these cases right every time, we must eliminate the death penalty,” he added.
Montgomery would be the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953, when Bonnie Heady was executed in a gas chamber, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
She was convicted in 2007 for the brutal killing of Bobbie Jo Stinnett three years earlier and for stealing her unborn baby girl. Montgomery, who lived in Kansas at the time, drove to the victim’s home in the Missouri town of Skidmore and used a rope to strangle her before extracting the child from her womb.
Sandra Babcock, one of the attorneys representing her, claims the killing was “the product of a psychotic episode” as her client suffers from severe mental illness and has a history of horrific trauma.
“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,” Babcock said in a statement Monday.
“Now, despite Lisa’s deteriorating mental health and a much deeper understanding of the trauma she endured, the government plans to kill her,” the lawyer said. “No other woman has been executed for a similar crime, because most prosecutors have recognized that it is inevitably the product of trauma and mental illness.”
Support for the death penalty in the U.S. has consistently gone down over the past several decades.
A Gallup poll conducted this summer found that a record-low 54% of Americans consider capital punishment to be morally acceptable. In a separate Gallup poll last year, a record-high 60% of respondents said life imprisonment is a better punishment than the death penalty.
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Several Democratic lawmakers, including New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, wrote a letter to Attorney General Bill Barr last week urging him to suspend all planned executions during the ongoing presidential transition.
“A record number of Americans voted in favor of President-Elect Biden and Vice-President Elect Harris and they deserve an opportunity to implement their policy agenda without the Trump Administration rushing to take preemptive and irreversible steps,” the letter states. “While you will remain in office for a few more weeks, going forward with executions in the weeks before the new administration takes office would be a grave injustice.”
Besides Montgomery, the other three federal inmates set to be executed in January are Alfred Bourgeois, who abused, tortured and beat his young daughter to death in 2002; Cory Johnson, who was convicted of killing seven people from 1989 to 1992; and Dustin John Higgs, who kidnapped and murdered three women in 1996.
