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A Kansas woman was executed on Wednesday for strangling a future mother in the US state of Missouri and tearing the baby from her womb, the first time in nearly seven decades that the US government has executed a female inmate.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. (local time) after receiving a lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was the 11th prisoner to receive a lethal injection there since July, when President Donald Trump, a fervent supporter of capital punishment, resumed federal executions after 17 years without one.
When a curtain was lifted in the execution chamber, Montgomery looked momentarily puzzled as he looked at the journalists watching from behind thick glass. As the execution process began, a woman on Montgomery’s shoulder leaned over, removed Montgomery’s face mask, and asked if he had any last words. “No,” Montgomery replied in a low, muffled voice. She didn’t say anything else.
He touched his fingers nervously for several seconds, with a heart-shaped tattoo on his thumb, but otherwise showed no signs of distress and quickly closed his eyes.
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“The cowardly bloodlust of a failed administration was on display tonight,” Montgomery 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 zeal 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 cleared the way for the execution to move forward. Montgomery was the first of the last three federal prisoners scheduled to die before President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration next week, who is expected to suspend federal executions.
But a federal judge in the District of Columbia stopped the executions scheduled for later this week of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs in a ruling Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people related to his drug trade in Virginia, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murder of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for Covid-19 last month.
Joseph C. Garza / AP
Death penalty opponent Wes Janz, of Indianapolis, holds up a sign for passing motorists to read as he and others protest the planned execution of Lisa Montgomery.
Montgomery killed 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwestern Missouri town of Skidmore in 2004. He used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and then cut the girl from the womb with a kitchen knife. Montgomery took the boy with her and tried to pass the girl off as his own.
An appeals court granted Montgomery a stay of execution on Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that she likely had a mental illness and could not understand that she would be executed. But both appeals were lifted, leading to the execution of the only woman on federal death row.
As the only woman on federal death row, Montgomery had been detained in a federal prison in Texas and was taken to Terre Haute Monday night.
Joseph C. Garza / AP
An appeals court on Tuesday granted a stay of execution for Montgomery, convicted of killing a pregnant woman and ripping the baby from her womb in the town of Skidmore, in northwestern Missouri, in 2004.
Montgomery has done embroidery in prison, making gloves, hats and other knitted items as gifts for her lawyers and others, Henry said. He has not been able to continue this hobby or read since his glasses were removed for fear that he could kill himself.
“All of her coping mechanisms were taken away from her when she was locked up” in October when she was informed that she had an execution date, Henry said.
Montgomery’s legal team says she suffered “sexual torture,” including gang rape, as a child, permanently scarring her emotionally and compounding the mental health problems that ran in her family.
At trial, prosecutors charged Montgomery with feigning mental illness, noting that his murder of Stinnett was premeditated and included meticulous planning, including an online investigation into how to perform a C-section.
Henry objected to that idea, citing extensive tests and brain scans that supported the diagnosis of mental illness.
Henry said the question at the heart of the legal arguments is not whether she knew the murder was wrong in 2004, but whether she fully understands why she is scheduled to be executed now.
In his ruling on a stay, United States District Judge James Patrick Hanlon in Terre Haute cited defense experts who alleged that Montgomery suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Montgomery, the judge wrote, also suffered at the time of the murder from an extremely rare condition called pseudocytosis in which a woman’s false belief that she is pregnant triggers hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.
Montgomery also experiences delusions and hallucinations, believing that God spoke to her through connecting the dots puzzles, the judge said, citing defense experts. The United States government has recognized Montgomery’s mental problems, but denies that she cannot understand that she is scheduled to be executed for killing someone else because of them.
The details of the crime sometimes left jurors in tears during their trial.
Prosecutors told jury that Montgomery drove about 274 kilometers from his farm in Melvern, Kansas, to the northwestern Missouri town of Skidmore, under the guise of adopting a Stinnett rat terrier puppy. She strangled Stinnett by performing a crude cesarean section and fleeing with the baby.
Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend himself when Montgomery cut the girl from her uterus. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up from the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, and told him that she had delivered the baby that same day at a nearby birthing center.
Montgomery was arrested the next day after bragging about the premature baby, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and has not spoken publicly about the tragedy.
Prosecutors said the reason was that Montgomery’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a tubal ligation that rendered her sterile and planned to reveal that he was lying about her pregnancy in an effort to gain custody of two of her four children. Montgomery, in need of a baby before the fast-approaching court date, turned her attention to Stinnett, whom she had met at dog shows.
Anti-death penalty groups said Trump was pushing for executions ahead of the November election in a cynical attempt to polish a reputation as a leader of law and order.
The last woman to be executed by the United States federal government was Bonnie Brown Heady on December 18, 1953, for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy in Missouri.
The last woman to be executed by a state was Kelly Gissendaner, 47, on September 30, 2015, in Georgia. She was found guilty of murder in 1997 for the murder of her husband after she conspired with her lover, who stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death.
