The U.S. is set to execute the first woman in nearly seven decades this week despite numerous calls to stop the proceeding based on her mental health and history of abuse.
Barring an unlikely last-minute intervention by federal courts or President Trump, convicted killer Lisa Montgomery will be put to death Tuesday at a federal facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. The former Kansas resident, who strangled a pregnant Missouri mother and gutted her open to steal the victim’s baby, would be the first woman put to death by the federal government since 1953, when convicted killer Bonnie Heady was executed in a gas chamber.
Montgomery, 52, is one of three federal inmates scheduled to receive a lethal injection this week as the Trump administration races to carry out a spree of last-minute executions before Jan. 20, when death penalty opponent Joe Biden becomes president.
Her lawyers filed a petition in Indiana federal court Friday arguing that putting Montgomery to death would violate the Eighth Amendment because she is “not competent” for execution and the Fifth Amendment because she has not been given the opportunity to prove her incompetence.
“Mrs. Montgomery has brain damage, severe mental illness, and suffered a lifetime of sexual torture,” they said in a statement, adding that her mental health is “deteriorating.”
Federal officials argue that Montgomery has already exhausted all her legal challenges and that they owe it to the victim’s family to carry out the penalty for which she was sentenced.
The woman was convicted in 2007 for killing dog breeder Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the Missouri town of Skidmore three years earlier and abducting her unborn child. The killer drove to the victim’s home that day under the guise of adopting a puppy from her, used a rope to fatally strangle the mom-to-be and extracted the baby girl from her womb.
Stinnett’s mother was the first one to call 911 after she found the gruesome scene.
“It’s like she exploded or something,” Becky Harper told dispatchers on Dec. 16, 2004.
Montgomery, who had a history of faking pregnancies, then tried to pass the child as her own, telling her then-husband that she had delivered the baby at a medical facility near their home. She eventually confessed and the tools used in the murder were found in her car.
Stinnett’s daughter, who’s now 16, has not publicly spoken about the case.
The Cornell Center for the Death Penalty Worldwide, one of several groups opposed to Montgomery’s execution, argues that the cycle of abuse she endured throughout her life “led directly” to the horrific crime.
“President Trump, please consider this evidence and spare Lisa Montgomery’s life,” the group said in an online petition that has garnered nearly 270,000 signatures. “Spending the rest of her life in prison is more than adequate punishment for this crime given Lisa’s traumatic history and mental illness.”
Montgomery’s brain damage stems from her mother’s drinking during pregnancy, but she also has multiple head injuries because her stepfather “frequently slammed her head into a concrete floor while raping her” when she was young, according to the petition filed last week.
Her lawyers also claim that the woman’s stepfather kept her as “a sexual slave” when she was a teenager and that her mother allowed men to gang-rape Montgomery in exchange for home repairs.
The horror continued after Montgomery was forced to marry her own stepbrother, who allegedly raped and beat her, according to the MoveOn petition.
“Not surprisingly, this lifetime of torture exacerbated Lisa’s genetic predisposition to mental illness, and caused her to develop a dissociative disorder in addition to complex post-traumatic stress disorder,” the petition states.
John Jenkins, president of the University of Notre Dame, has also condemned the scheduled execution, saying it undermines “our commitment to the sanctity of all human life.”
“Death row inmates have been convicted of some of the most awful crimes imaginable, yet even their lives do not lose that dignity,” Jenkins said in a statement Sunday.
“President Trump, you have pardoned many in your last days in power. Please take this final opportunity to act humanely in the cause of upholding the sanctity of life.”
The Trump administration resumed federal executions last summer after a 17-year hiatus. Since then, 10 federal inmates have been put to death — more than the previous six decades combined.
With News Wire Services
