TERRE HAUTE, Indiana (AP) – The US government’s plans to carry out the first execution of an inmate in nearly seven decades were suspended on Tuesday amid a flood of court decisions, and two other executions scheduled for the end of this week was suspended because inmates tested positive for COVID-19.
The three executions would be the last before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, took office next week. It is now unclear how many additional executions will take place under President Donald Trump, who resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year break. Ten federal inmates have already been sentenced to death.
Lisa Montgomery faced execution on Tuesday for killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, in the city of Skidmore, in northwest Missouri, in 2004. She 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 child with her and tried to make the girl his own.
But an appeals court granted the suspension of execution on Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court suspended the decision of an Indiana judge who concluded that she probably had mental problems and could not understand that she would be put to death. If a higher court postpones the execution, Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, will receive a lethal injection at a federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Separately, a federal judge in the US District of Columbia suspended scheduled executions later this week of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs in a decision on Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people related to his drug trafficking in Virginia, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murder of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for COVID-19 last month.
Delays in any of the executions scheduled for this week, in addition to Biden’s inauguration next Tuesday, would likely mean that they won’t happen anytime soon, if ever, since the Biden government must oppose the execution of federal death sentences.
One of Montgomery’s lawyers, Kelley Henry, told the Associated Press Tuesday morning that her client arrived at the Terre Haute facility on Monday night from a Texas prison and that, as there are no facilities for inmates, she was being held in a cell in the execution chamber building itself.
“I don’t think she has any rational understanding of what’s going on,” said Henry.
Montgomery made a needle in prison, making gloves, hats and other knitted items as gifts for his lawyers and others, said Henry. She hasn’t been able to continue with that hobby or read since her glasses were removed from her with the concern that she might commit suicide.
“All of her coping mechanisms were removed from her when they locked her up” in October, when she was told she had an execution date, said Henry.
Montgomery’s legal team says she suffered “sexual torture”, including gang rape, as a child, permanently leaving her with an emotional scar and exacerbating her family’s mental health problems.
At the trial, prosecutors accused Montgomery of faking mental illness, noting that Stinnett’s murder was premeditated and included meticulous planning, including online research on how to perform a caesarean section.
Henry rejected the idea, citing extensive tests and brain scans that supported the diagnosis of mental illness.
“You cannot fake brain scans that show brain damage,” she said.
Henry said the central question of the legal arguments is not whether she knew the murder was wrong in 2004, but whether she understands why it is scheduled to be executed now.
In his decision on the suspension, US District Judge James Patrick Hanlon in Terre Haute cited defense experts who claimed 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 of an extremely rare condition called pseudocyesis, in which a woman’s false belief that she was pregnant causes hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.
Montgomery also experiences delusions and hallucinations, believing that God spoke to her through jigsaw puzzles to connect the dots, the judge said, citing defense experts.
“The record before the Court contains ample evidence that Ms. Montgomery’s current mental state is so divorced from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government’s justification for its execution,” said the judge.
The government has acknowledged Montgomery’s mental problems, but disputes that she cannot understand that she is scheduled to be executed for killing another person because of them.
The details of the crime sometimes left juries in tears during their trial.
Prosecutors told the jury that Montgomery drove about 274 kilometers from his farmhouse in Melvern, Kansas, to the city of Skidmore, in northwest Missouri, on the pretext of adopting a Stinnett terrier rat puppy. She strangled Stinnett by performing a gross caesarean section and running away with the baby.
Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend himself while Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the girl out of her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up at the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, saying she had given birth to the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birth center.
Montgomery was arrested the next day after showing the premature child, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 and has not spoken publicly about the tragedy.
Prosecutors said the reason was that Montgomery’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a sterilization that made her sterile and planned to reveal that she was lying about being pregnant in an attempt to take custody of two of her four children. Needing a baby before the rapidly approaching trial date, Montgomery turned his attention to Stinnett, whom she met at dog shows.
Anti-death penalty groups said Trump was pushing for executions before the November election in a cynical attempt to polish his reputation as a leader of law and order.
The last woman executed by the 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 executed by a state it was Kelly Gissendaner, 47, on September 30, 2015, in Georgia. She was convicted of murder in the murder of her husband in 1997, after conspiring with her lover, who stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death.
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Hollingsworth reported from Kansas.