USA has executed the first woman in almost 70 years

This Wednesday, the federal government of the United States executed a woman for the first time in almost 70 years after the Supreme Court gave the green light to the death penalty for lethal injection, suspended hours earlier.

Lisa Montgomery, 52, was pronounced dead at 1.31 am (5.31 in mainland Portugal), in the federal prison dTerre Haute, in the state of Indiana.

Montgomery had been convicted in 2007 for crimes committed in 2004, when she strangled an eight-month-old pregnant woman and pulled the child out of the victim’s womb, then trying to pass the baby over to her. The child, now 16, would eventually be rescued by the police.

Hours earlier, a court suspended the woman’s execution because she suffered from mental illness, including depression, personality disorder (“borderline”) and post-traumatic stress, but the Supreme Court would eventually give the green light to the application of the sentence.

Lisa Montgomery’s lawyers claimed that she had suffered “sexual torture” as a child, aggravating common mental problems in the family.

“Our Constitution prohibits the execution of a person who is not able to understand his execution rationally (…). The current administration knows this [mas] they still killed her, “said lawyer Kelley Henry in a statement.

The last execution of a woman by the United States government had taken place on December 18, 1953.

The execution was the first of three scheduled until the departure of the White House from Donald Trump, a fervent capital punisher, who resumed federal executions after they were abandoned for 17 years. Joe Biden, who takes office on January 20 as president of the United States, is expected to end executions by order of the federal government.

Although this is the first federal execution of a woman in more than six decades, in recent years there have been several executions of detainees in states that admit the death penalty, the most recent of which in 2015 in Georgia.

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