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Lisa Montgomery, the only woman currently on federal death row in the United States, assumed that it would be January 12 that she would die. However, the application of the sentence has been modified and can only be rescheduled from January 1 and, if it happens, it will be after the inauguration of Joe Biden, who opposes the death penalty in the country .
The woman has been on death row since 2004, when she was found guilty of murdering a 23-year-old pregnant woman in northwestern Missouri. Before committing the crime, his life was full of abuse, pain and anguish. The testimony was shared by her half-sister, Diane Mattingly, with whom she remained in contact until she was 8 years old. Mattingly was handed over to child protective services.
Contacted by Montgomery’s defense, who wanted to find sufficient evidence to prevent the death penalty from being applied, the half-sister with whom she had not had contact for 33 years revealed the climate of tension and abuse that both suffered at the hands of her stepmother. with which they both lived. In one of the reports, he told how he forced her to sleep naked in the street or eat raw onions as punishment.
For several nights, Montgomery’s defense half-sister, cited by “Slate” magazine, was abused by her stepmother’s lovers. When the agents of the child protective services learned of the abuse she suffered, they took her home and during the car trip she vomited several times because she knew that from that moment on she would never be able to protect Montgomery, who would be alone. with the stepmother.
In 2005, at the height of the crime, Montgomery attacked a 23-year-old girl named Bobbie Jo Stinnett and reportedly cut the child from its mother’s womb and took it as her own. During the investigations, all the leads pointed to the woman who was quickly detained by the police, to whom she handed over all the evidence of the crime.
In the five days after the ghoulish crime made headlines in various newspapers across the country, Montgomery lost his memory and revealed that he had no recollection of what happened. However, and according to the psychologists who accompanied her during her detention, she always pleaded guilty. After a thorough analysis of the defendant’s behavior, the experts concluded that Montgomery suffered from various mental illnesses and that, therefore, his destination should be a psychiatric clinic.
However, the sentence awarded was the death penalty. As a resource, a team of experts came together to try to prove how decades of abuse had led to the crime. To this end, lawyers and psychologists have partnered with private investigators to try to understand the true story of Lisa Montgomery.
What they found surprised them. Montgomery’s cousin David Kidwell told experts that, during her childhood, Lisa revealed that she had been raped several times and for hours by her father and friends that she took home. During the abuse, it was common for the girl to be beaten and humiliated with urine and, now it is known, the attacks occurred with the knowledge of the mother, who prostituted her daughter in exchange for money to buy alcohol.
In the same testimony, Kidwell also revealed that the mother went further by causing irreparable psychological damage to the daughter, having killed the family dog in front of him or assaulted the daughter several times while forcing her to stand in a corner of the room. room. Lisa Montgomery grew up amid chaos and, at age 18, married her half-brother who abused her and hit her consecutively.
It was from this investigation that the entire defense of this woman concluded, based on the evidence provided by the team of psychologists with whom she worked, that Montgomery suffered one of the “most serious cases of dissociation” in addition to post-traumatic stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. personality.
All these elements, however, were not enough to dismiss the courts that sentenced her to the death penalty to be applied on January 12. The date was postponed by Judge Randolph Moss, of the United States District Court, considering that the Department of Justice illegally rescheduled the date on which the inmate’s sentence would be applied. It is now known that the new date can only be rescheduled from January 1 and that, if it happens, it will be after the inauguration of Joe Biden, who opposes the death penalty.
Although there are several death row inmates in the United States, Montgomery is the only woman who has so far awaited execution by federal court order. The date change was authorized after the woman’s lawyers became infected with the new coronavirus and, due to the prophylactic isolation they were subjected to, they were unable to request clemency.
Now, and according to the new order, it is known that a new date cannot be set until the first day of January. Also, one of the legal parameters says that a person sentenced to death must be notified at least twenty days before his sentence is applied. This means, therefore, that the execution will apply until after Biden’s inauguration on January 20.
The now president-elect is a fierce opponent of the death penalty and has already made it known that, as the country’s president, he will work in that direction. However, it is not known whether executions scheduled for 2021, such as Montgomery’s, will stop or not.
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