A Kansas woman received a lethal injection Wednesday for strangling a pregnant woman in Missouri and removing her baby. It was the first time in nearly seven decades that the United States government executed a female inmate.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, was pronounced dead at 01:31 after receiving a lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. He was the 11th jailed person to receive the injection since July, when President Donald Trump, a staunch defender of the death penalty, resumed federal executions after 17 years.
When the curtain to the execution room was lifted, Montgomery looked momentarily taken aback as she saw the journalists watching her from behind thick glass. As the execution process began, a woman who was standing next to her leaned over, took off her mask, and asked her if she wanted to say any last words. “No,” Montgomery replied quietly.
She moved her fingers nervously for several seconds, but showed no further signs of distress and quickly closed her eyes.
“Tonight has exposed the cowardly bloodlust of a failed government,” Montgomery’s attorney Kelley Henry said in a statement. “Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should be ashamed.”
“The government stopped at nothing in its endeavor to kill this damaged and delusional woman,” Henry said. “The execution of Lisa Montgomery was far from justice.”
It came after hours of legal wrangling before the Supreme Court paved the way for the process to continue. Montgomery was the first of three federal inmates to be executed before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week. The Democrat is expected to suspend federal executions.
A federal judge for the District of Columbia stayed the executions of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs, scheduled for the end of the week, on Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people related to drug trafficking in Virginia, and Higgs, sentenced for ordering the murder of three women in Maryland, tested positive for COVID-19 last month.
Montgomery killed 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwestern Missouri town of Skidmore in December 2004. He used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was in her eighth month of pregnancy, and carried the baby out with a kitchen knife. So he took the girl away and tried to pass her off as his own.
An appeals court had granted Montgomery a stay of execution on Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted a ruling by an Indiana judge that found that she was likely mentally ill and could not understand that she was going to be executed. . But the Supreme Court rejected the appeals allowing the execution of the only inmate on federal death row.
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