The only female inmate on death row, jailed for kidnapping and strangling a pregnant woman in a bid to steal her baby, was granted a last-minute reprieve just hours before her scheduled execution.
Judge James Hanlon of the US District Court for the Southern District of Indiana late Monday night granted a stay in the execution of Lisa Montgomery, citing evidence that suggests she does not understand the government’s reasoning for sentencing her to death.
His decision was later upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, delaying any new execution date into Joe Biden’s administration barring intervention from the Supreme Court.
Montgomery was set to die by lethal injection Tuesday morning at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Ind. She was initially scheduled to be put to death on Dec. 8., but the execution was temporarily blocked after her attorneys contracted coronavirus while visiting her in prison.
She would have been the first female inmate to be executed by the federal government since 1953, when convicted killer Bonnie Heady was executed in a gas chamber.
A date for Montgomery’s competency hearing has not yet been set, and prosecutors have already announced their intentions to appeal the judge’s ruling.
In December 2004, the 52-year-old drove 170 miles from her farm in Melvern to Northwest Missouri under the guise of adopting a pet from dogbreeder Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant at the time. When she arrived at the Skidmore residence, police said Montgomery used a rope to fatally strangle the 23-year-old mother-to-be before gutting the baby from her womb and fleeing the scene.
Amid a flurry of Amber Alerts for the missing newborn, Montgomery — who had a history of faking pregnancies — attempted to pass the child off as her own. She told her husband at the time that she delivered the baby at a medical facility near their home before eventually confessing to Stinnett’s brutal slaying.
Montgomery was convicted in 2007 in Missouri and sentenced to death the following year.
Kelley Henry, who is part of Montgomery’s legal team, praised the judge’s decision to delay the execution in a statement to Reuters late Monday.
“Mrs. Montgomery is mentally deteriorating and we are seeking an opportunity to prove her incompetence,” he said.
Montgomery’s lawyers have repeatedly petitioned President Trump for clemency, arguing that she only committed the brutal crime because she spent her life a victim of incest, child sex trafficking, gang rape, physical abuse and neglect — and mostly at the hands of her own family members.
In a nearly 7,000-page clemency petition filed on Friday, attorneys requested that the out-going president commute Montgomery’s sentence to life in prison.
Since federal executions resumed in July after a 17-year pause, the government has executed 10 people, more than in any presidency since 1896.
Dustin Higgs is scheduled to be executed on Thursday for his involvement in the kidnapping and murder of three women. He did not kill the victims himself, and the person who did received life without parole.
With News Wire Services
