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A woman who murdered a pregnant woman and removed the fetus from her womb will become the first federal prisoner to be executed in the United States in 70 years.
Lisa Montgomery, who had pretended to be pregnant, will be executed by lethal injection for killing 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in December 2004.
Ms. Stinnett was pregnant with her first child when Montgomery lured the victim to her home, where she strangled the expectant mother with a rope and cut the baby from her womb with a kitchen knife.
A doctor who testified at Montgomery’s trial said that Ms Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, was probably still alive when the killer began carrying her baby, a girl named Victoria Jo who miraculously survived.
Montgomery, now 52, was arrested by police after showing the baby as her own in her hometown of Melvern, Kansas.
Victoria Jo was rescued and returned to her father.
Montgomery had met the dog breeders, Ms. Stinnett, and her husband at a dog show a few months earlier, and used a fake online profile to schedule a meeting at the victim’s home in Skidmore, Missouri.
In October 2007, juries took just four hours of deliberation to find Montgomery guilty of kidnapping that resulted in death, a federal crime.
The jury rejected his claims that he was delusional.
She was later sentenced to death and has been sentenced to death ever since.
The US Department of Justice announced that Montgomery has only seven weeks to live, if the execution continues on December 8 as scheduled.
The lethal injection will take place in a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Kelley Henry, his attorney, said Montgomery has a mental illness and was abused as a child, so he should not be executed.
Ms. Henry said, “Lisa Montgomery has long accepted full responsibility for her crime and will never get out of jail.”
“But her severe mental illness and the devastating effects of her childhood trauma make executing her a profound injustice.”
It will be the first time the United States government has executed a woman since Bonnie Heady was executed in a gas chamber in Missouri in December 1953.
Heady, 41, was executed for the September 1953 kidnapping and murder of Robert (Bobby) Cosgrove Greenlease Jnr, six, the son of a wealthy car dealer.
She and her accomplice Carl Hall were executed together.
The United States Department of Justice also scheduled a December 10 execution for Brandon Bernard, who with his accomplices murdered his husband and wife Todd and Stacie Bagley, who were youth ministers, in Texas in June 1999.
The victims were kidnapped and shot while stuffed in the trunk of a car, which was set on fire while Ms. Bagley was still alive.
The two executions will be the eighth and the ninth to be carried out by the United States government in 2020.
The Trump administration resumed federal executions in July 2019 after a 14-year hiatus.
He said the Bureau of Prisons had moved to a new single-drug protocol for lethal injections, replacing the three-drug cocktail he had used until 2003.
But the new protocol has faced legal challenges.
In August, a federal judge ruled that the US Department of Justice was violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by failing to request a prescription to administer the highly regulated barbiturate.
However, an appeals court later allowed federal executions to resume, saying that the violation of the law did not in itself amount to “irreparable harm”.
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