TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) – The U.S. government’s plans to carry out the first execution of a female prisoner in nearly seven decades came amid a spate of court rulings on Tuesday, and two other executions launched later this week were halted because the prisoners tested positive for COVID-19.
The three executions would be the last before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, is sworn in next week. It is now unclear how many additional executions there will be under President Donald Trump, who resumed in July after 17 years of federal executions. Ten federal prisoners have since been killed.
Lisa Montgomery was executed on Tuesday for the murder of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the town of Skidmore in northwestern Missouri. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and cut the baby girl out of the womb with a baby. kitchen utensils. Montgomery took the child with her and tried to hand over the girl as her own.
But an appeals court on Tuesday granted a suspension of execution, shortly after another appeals court overturned the verdict of an Indiana judge, who found she was probably mentally ill and could not understand that she would be killed. If a higher court applied the execution again, Montgomery, the only woman in the federal death prison, would receive a lethal injection in a federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Separately, a federal judge for the U.S. District of Columbia upheld the planned executions of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs in a ruling later this week. Johnson, who was convicted of the murder of seven people involved in his drug dealing in Virginia, and Higgs, who was convicted of ordering the murder of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for COVID-19 last month. .
Delay in the scheduled executions this week following Biden’s inauguration next Tuesday is likely to mean that it will not happen anytime soon or ever, as a Biden government is expected to take action against the execution of federal death sentences.
One of Montgomery’s lawyers, Kelley Henry, told The Associated Press on Tuesday morning that her client arrived late Monday night from a Texas jail at the Terre Haute plant and that she was being held in a cell because there were no facilities for women. prisoners are not. the execution room building itself.
“I do not believe at all that she has a rational understanding of what is going on,” Henry said.
Montgomery did sewing in prison and made gloves, hats and other knitted items as gifts for her lawyers and others, Henry said. She could not continue or read that hobby as her glasses were taken away from her out of concern that she might commit suicide.
“All her handling mechanisms were taken away from her when they locked her up,” when she was notified in October that she had an execution date, Henry said.
Montgomery’s legal team said she had ‘sexual torture’ as a child, including gang rapes, which left her permanently emotionally hurt and exacerbated the mental health issues that occur in her family.
At trial, prosecutors accused Montgomery of having decayed mental illness, noting that her murder of Stinnett was premeditated and that it included careful planning, including online research on how to conduct a C-section.
Henry is appalled by the idea and cites extensive tests and brain scans that support the diagnosis of mental illness.
“You can’t do brain scans that show the brain damage,” she said.
Henry said the issue at the heart of the legal arguments was not whether she knew the 2004 murder was wrong, but whether she fully understood why she was going to be executed now.
In his ruling on a stay, U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon quoted defense experts in Terre Haute claiming that Montgomery suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The judge wrote that Montgomery also suffered during the murder under an extremely rare condition called pseudocyesis in which the false belief of a woman that she is pregnant causes hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.
Montgomery also experiences delusions and hallucinations and believes God spoke to her through puzzles, the judge said, referring to defense experts.
“The report before the court contains sufficient evidence that Mrs Montgomery’s current state of mind is so separated from reality that she cannot understand the rationale of the government for her execution,” the judge said.
The government acknowledged Montgomery’s mental issues, but disputed that she could not understand that she had been executed as a result of the murder of another person.
Details about the crime sometimes left jurors in tears during her trial.
Prosecutors told the jury Montgomery drove about 274 miles from her farmhouse Melvern, Kansas, to the northern city of Skidmore, Missouri, under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy from Stinnett. She strangled Stinnett by performing a crude caesarean section and fleeing with the baby.
Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend herself while Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the little girl out of her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, and told her she had given birth to the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birthplace.
Montgomery was arrested the next day after showing off her premature baby, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and has yet to speak publicly about the tragedy.
Prosecutors said the motive was that the ex-husband of Montgomery knew she had undergone a tube tie that made her sterile and planned to reveal that she was lying about being pregnant in an attempt to supervise two of their four children to get. Montgomery, who needs a baby before a fast-approaching court date, turned her attention to Stinnett, whom she met at dog shows.
Anti-death penalty groups said Trump was insisting on executions before the November election in a cynical attempt to burn a reputation as a law-and-order leader.
The last woman to be executed by the federal government was Bonnie Brown Heady on December 18, 1953 for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy in Missouri.
The last woman executed by a state was Kelly Gissendaner (47) on September 30, 2015 in Georgia. She was convicted of murder in the murder of her husband in 1997 after she had a conspiracy with her lover, which stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death.
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Hollingsworth reports from Kansas.