All year long in her cell in Texas, Lisa Montgomery crochets angels and Christmas tree ornaments and elaborate nativity scenes overrun with more angels. On Christmas Eve, her attorneys called her to say that a judge in Washington, D.C., had ruled that a new execution date for her couldn’t even be scheduled until Jan. 1 at the earliest.
Then, she’d have to be given the legally required 20 days notice of that new date, according to the ruling from D.C. District Judge Randolph Moss.
It wasn’t clear how much of this Montgomery really understood: “Her connection with reality is fairly tenuous,” especially under stress, one of her lawyers, Sandra Babcock, said in an interview with The Kansas City Star Editorial Board.
For a minute there, it seemed that the 52-year-old Kansan’s life was likely to be spared.
But on Friday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the execution can proceed. Barring any successful last-minute appeal, the 52-year-old Montgomery will become, on Jan. 12, the first female federal inmate to be executed in nearly 70 years.
Her attorney asks, “Is Lisa Montgomery the kind of person who should be put to death?”
A brain-damaged, severely mentally ill person, that is, hideously abused throughout her life, trafficked by her own mother. A person the system ignored even after she testified in her mother’s divorce case about being raped on a regular basis by her stepfather and his friends. A person who never received any treatment until after she’d committed a gruesome crime of her own, slicing a child from the womb of a young Missouri woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, with a kitchen knife.
If this government ever did reflect on whether she’s the kind of person we could feel righteous about killing, however, it did so briefly and then answered yes.
Lawyers including Tim Garrison, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, defended their decision: “Montgomery received ample notice of her execution date and will not suffer irreparable harm from the bare procedural violation she alleges.”
If death isn’t irreparable, we’re not sure what is, but the government lawyers go on to argue that Montgomery “has no equitable interest in enjoying a windfall from defendants’ rescheduling of her execution to a date permitted by this court’s prior injunction.”
The “windfall” in question would involve being allowed to keep breathing.
Opposition to the death penalty has been growing for some time, but even many of those who support it don’t think it was ever meant to be used against someone as impaired as Lisa Montgomery.
Montgomery’s death at our hands would be so unconscionable that it might even be the death knell of the death penalty. It would be totally in keeping with her luckless life if she were one of the last to be put to death in our name.
— The Kansas City Star
Source: easternnewmexiconews.com, The Kansas City Star, January 6, 2021
Lawyers for U.S. death row's lone woman say she was tortured, seeks Trump's clemency
Jan 5 (Reuters) - Lawyers for Lisa Montgomery, a convicted murderer and the only woman on federal death row, asked U.S. President Donald Trump to halt her execution scheduled for next week, saying she committed her crime after a lifetime of being abused and raped.
Montgomery, due to be killed by lethal injections of a barbiturate on Jan. 12, was convicted in 2007 in Missouri for kidnapping and strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then eight months pregnant. Montgomery then cut Stinnett’s fetus from the womb. The child survived.
Montgomery suffered sexual abuse and torture at the hands of her stepfather and mother that Montgomery’s lawyers and her sister, who was also raped in their childhood home, compared to a horror movie. In a nearly 7,000-page clemency petition filed on Tuesday, they asked Trump to commute Montgomery’s sentence to life in prison.
“Broken before she was born, Lisa Montgomery’s life was filled with torture, terror, failure, and betrayal,” the lawyers wrote, saying Montgomery was born brain-damaged because of her mother’s alcoholism.
Montgomery is held at the Federal Medical Center in Carswell, Texas, a prison for inmates with mental illness.
Trump is a long-time exponent of the death penalty, and has allowed more executions in a year than any other U.S. president has done since the 19th century. His administration revived the punishment in the federal system in 2020 after a 17-year hiatus even as the novel coronavirus spread to infect prison employees, inmates’ lawyers and two other inmates facing execution. President-elect Joe Biden has said he will seek to abolish the death penalty. He takes office on Jan. 20.
The lawyers have said it is wrong to execute Montgomery because of her mental illness and because other women who have committed similar crimes did not face the death penalty.
Montgomery, now 52, was abused by her stepfather, who built a room in the back of a trailer where they lived in which he and his friends raped her from about the age of 11 on and where her mother pimped her for sex, Montgomery’s lawyers said.
Diane Mattingly, Montgomery’s older sister, told reporters at a briefing that she was also repeatedly raped, sometimes with Montgomery in the same room, until authorities removed her to foster care.
“So many people let her down,” Mattingly said. “Yes, I started out the same way, but I went into a place where I was loved and cared for and shown self worth. I had a good foundation. Lisa did not and she broke. She literally broke.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
