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WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The US Justice Department said on Friday it had scheduled the first federal execution of a woman in nearly 70 years, setting a Dec. 8 date to sentence Lisa Montgomery, convicted of a murder in 2004.
Montgomery, who was found guilty of strangling a pregnant woman in Missouri, will be executed by lethal injection at the Terre Haute, Indiana, US Penitentiary, the department said in a statement.
The last woman to be executed by the United States government was Bonnie Heady, who was executed in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
On Friday, the Justice Department also scheduled a December 10 execution for Brandon Bernard, who with his accomplices murdered two youth ministers in 1999.
The two executions will be the eighth and ninth to be carried out by the federal government in 2020.
The Trump administration ended an informal 17-year hiatus in federal executions in July, after announcing last year that the Bureau of Prisons was switching to a new single-drug protocol for lethal injections of a three-drug combination. which you last used in 2003..
The new protocol revived long-standing legal challenges to lethal injections. In August, a federal judge in Washington, DC ruled that the Justice Department was violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act by failing to request a doctor’s prescription to administer the highly regulated barbiturate.
But an appeals court held that the violation itself did not amount to “irreparable harm” and allowed federal executions to continue.
In 2007, a United States district court for the Western District of Missouri sentenced Montgomery to death after finding her guilty of a federal kidnapping that resulted in death.
His attorney, Kelley Henry, said Montgomery deserves to live because he suffers from mental illness and suffered from child abuse.
“Lisa Montgomery has long accepted full responsibility for her crime and will never get out of jail,” Henry said in a statement. “But her severe mental illness and the devastating effects of her childhood trauma make executing her a profound injustice.”
Bernard’s attorney, Robert Owen, said in a statement that the federal government misled the jury of the United States District Court for the Western District of Texas, which in 2000 found Bernard guilty of murder. His decision was tainted by false testimony, Owen said.
“This evidence confirms that Mr. Bernard is simply not one of the ‘worst of the worst’ criminals for whom we reserve the death penalty, and that saving his life would pose no risk to anyone,” Owen said.
(Reported by Mohammad Zargham and Brendan O’Brien and Rich McKay; Editing by Sandra Maler and Bill Tarrant)
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