US, federal execution for a woman is scheduled: it is the first in 60 years

Montgomery’s execution is scheduled for December 8, in the death chamber of the Terre Haute Federal Penitentiary, in Indiana. Two days later it will be the turn of Brandon Bernard, 40, who in 1999 killed two young religious men in Texas. Lisa, 52, was instead guilty of a murder that Minister Barr defined as “particularly heinous”: in 2004 she strangled a 29-year-old pregnant woman and, after cutting her belly, kidnapped the eight-month-old girl not yet born and now she is 16 years old.

Up to now, the appeals and requests of Lisa’s lawyers have been useless, who defined the minister’s decision “a grave injustice”: in fact, the woman has always suffered from severe mental disorders, having lived a childhood and adolescence full of violence and abuse, raped several times from the partner of the mother and then abused also by the two husbands. A condition of mental discomfort also aggravated by alcohol dependence. In short, a devastated existence destined to end with a poisonous mix injected into his veins. Although various organizations for the defense of human rights and fighting against the death penalty promise to fight until the last moment.

To find a woman who was a victim of the federal executioner in the US, you have to go back to 1953, when two were executed. One of them was Ethel Rosenberg, protagonist of one of the darkest and most controversial events of the Cold War years, when with her husband Julius she was sentenced to the electric chair on charges of espionage, for having passed secret information on the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union. The other inmate executed in 1953 is Bonny Heady, sentenced to the gas chamber for killing a 6-year-old boy.

The only other woman in American history sent to death by order of the federal government was in 1865 Mary Suratt, owner of a pension, hanged on charges of taking part in a conspiracy to assassinate the president Abraham Lincoln.

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