After an unprecedented execution spree, the administration hopes to end the lives of three people this week — including two recovering from COVID-19.
Since President Donald Trump incited violent rioters to storm the U.S. Capitol last week, lawmakers and members of his own Cabinet have mulled whether he’s too dangerous to complete the final days of his presidency. Twitter, Facebook and Snapchat have decided he’s currently unfit to operate social media accounts on their platform.
But he still has the power to kill.
During his last full week as president, the Trump administration plans to execute three people on death row, capping a historically unprecedented six-month execution spree. The people scheduled for execution — just days before the inauguration of a president who opposes the death penalty — include a woman with a mental illness untreated at the time of her crime, a man with an intellectual disability that should render him ineligible for execution, and a man who did not pull the trigger in the killing he was convicted of.
Trump’s executions, which began this past summer and are scheduled to culminate on Jan. 15, have coincided with a pandemic that has reached directly into the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal death row is located. At one point in December, the prison had at least 410 incarcerated people infected with COVID-19, more than any other Bureau of Prisons facility in the country.
After members of BOP’s execution team fell ill with COVID-19, the government failed to conduct thorough contact tracing in an effort to keep the identities of those involved in the killings secret.
Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs, scheduled to be killed on Thursday and Friday, respectively, were diagnosed with COVID-19 last month and are still experiencing symptoms. The lung damage from their illness is likely to make their deaths by lethal injection even more painful, according to medical experts. “Basically, he will be waterboarded to death, he will be drowned,” said Shawn Nolan, one of Higgs’ attorneys.
Autopsy reports show that the government’s execution protocol, a lethal injection of pentobarbital, may torture as it kills — even in healthy individuals. When used in executions, the drug often causes a condition called pulmonary edema, where fluid enters the lungs while the person is still conscious, creating a painful sensation similar to suffocating or drowning.
There is ongoing litigation over the constitutionality of the process, given the apparent cruel and unusual punishment it would inflict. Several of the plaintiffs were executed before seeing the result of their legal fight. Some medical experts now warn individuals with COVID-19 who are injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital will likely experience pulmonary edema faster, resulting in more conscious pain and suffering.
The outbreak at Terre Haute has also put family and loved ones of those facing execution — and the families of their victims — in an impossible situation: To bear witness to the killing, they must risk contracting a potentially fatal disease.
The man who administered last rites to death row prisoner Orlando Hall came down with COVID-19 following the November execution. Others, including the lead attorneys for Lisa Montgomery, scheduled to be killed on Tuesday, contracted COVID-19 during legal work for her case.
Beyond the risk of infection, executing people during a pandemic also limits access to effective counsel for the individuals on death row. Travel restrictions hinder lawyers’ ability to interview sources for clemency petitions and coronavirus-related lockdowns at the prison complicate lawyers’ access to their clients.
Here are the stories of those condemned to die.
A ‘Broken’ Woman
Lisa Montgomery, 52, the only woman on federal death row, is scheduled to be executed on Tuesday. Her lawyers say that she should be spared the death penalty, citing her severe mental illness and history of extreme childhood trauma that contributed to the breakdown in her mental health.
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She was born into a home of poverty, domestic violence, neglect and sexual abuse. Her mother, who drank while she was pregnant with Montgomery, lacked the necessary skills to care for her children, beating them and denying them basic care. Montgomery’s first words, according to one account, were “Don’t spank me. It hurts.”
After Montgomery’s father left, her mother remarried Jack Kleiner, a violent man who terrorized the children in the home. When Montgomery was 11, he began molesting her, according to family statements. He built a special room onto a trailer on an isolated tract of land in Oklahoma where he would rape Montgomery. Later, her parents trafficked her out to other men, telling the teen that she had to pay for her room and board. The men raped, sodomized and even urinated on her, she told a cousin at the time.
Montgomery began to disconnect from reality in response to the abuse. Mental health experts who have examined her believe that she developed an extreme dissociative disorder as a way of coping with the sexual and physical violence that was a mainstay of her childhood.
As an adult, Montgomery’s life mimicked that of her childhood. She lived in poverty and was unable to care for the four children she had in the course of four years. Her mental health deteriorated. “Lisa was so out of touch that she often did not respond to her own name,” her lawyers wrote in her clemency petition. “She mistook ammonia for vinegar while cooking. Her home was filthy. She could not dress her children or help them with their hair.”
Still, being a mother was a key part of her identity, and her delusions manifested there. Even after she had undergone a sterilization procedure, she pretended to be pregnant on multiple occasions.
In 2004, Montgomery, then 36, drove from her home in Kansas to Missouri to meet up with Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, who was eight months pregnant. Then she did the unthinkable. Montgomery strangled Stinnett and cut open her abdomen, removing the fetus. She then transported the baby home, telling her husband she’d given birth at a clinic. The next day, the police arrested Montgomery. The baby, who was physically uninjured, was returned to her father. Montgomery confessed and was sentenced to death.
“Mrs. Montgomery was psychotic at the time of the crime,” one of her lawyers, Amy Harwell said. “She has always accepted responsibility. This is someone who was deeply remorseful, once she became appropriately medicated and had full contact with reality, although that is a situation that waxes and wanes.”
Montgomery is diagnosed with bipolar disorder with psychotic features and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. She has been under constant psychiatric care since her arrest and takes antipsychotic medications.
She was initially scheduled to be executed on Dec. 8, but her two lead attorneys — Harwell and Kelley Henry — both got sick with COVID-19 following visits with Montgomery in prison. A district court delayed her execution and gave her lawyers more time to finish her clemency petition.
Henry, who has been working on Montgomery’s case since 2012, said she was frustrated and angry that her client was scheduled to be killed during the pandemic, since it has hampered efforts to save her life.
“When I have had clients executed, I could always say I know I did everything I possibly could,” she said in an interview. “I know I’m doing everything I possibly can for Lisa under these circumstances, but if the circumstances were different … I don’t know what it would be.”
The pandemic has also impeded Montgomery’s family’s visits. Diane Mattingly, Montgomery’s sister, said that prison officials canceled her last scheduled visit with her sibling because of a COVID-19 outbreak. She is afraid she will never see her again.
“She’s lived a tortured life and she has been broken,” Mattingly said. “I understand she needs to stay in prison the rest of her life, I do. But the death penalty? It doesn’t feel like justice. So many people let her down. I’m just begging that somebody will stand up for her for once.”
Source: huffpost.com, Melissa Jeltsen and Jessica Schulberg, January 11, 2021
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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
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde