With only a few hours to go until the scheduled execution of Lisa Montgomery, a convicted murderer and the first woman to face the federal death penalty in nearly seven decades, a federal judge on Monday night placed a temporary end pending a review of mental competence.
The date for such a hearing was not immediately informed, and prosecutors filed a notice to appeal the decision.
Kelley Henry, a lawyer for Montgomery, 52, said he suffered from a severe mental illness that was “made worse by the sexual torture he suffered at the hands of his caregivers”. Psychiatric experts submitted statements as part of her appeal, claiming that she was unable to understand the basis of her execution.
“Mrs. Montgomery is deteriorating mentally and we are looking for an opportunity to prove her incompetence,” said Henry in a statement.
Montgomery’s execution, which was planned for Tuesday, was one of three scheduled by the Justice Department this week, taking place in the twilight of Trump’s presidency and just days before President-elect Joe Biden took office.
Biden suggested that he would impose a moratorium on the federal death penalty.
In December 2004, Montgomery, then 36 and living in Kansas, crossed state lines to Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s home in Missouri, which she met at a dog show, federal prosecutors said. Stinnett was eight months pregnant.
Montgomery strangled Stinnett with a rope and used a kitchen knife she brought from home to remove the fetus, according to court documents. The girl survived. Montgomery tried to pass it off on his own, but was quickly arrested and later convicted by a jury and sentenced to death unanimously.
Montgomery was incarcerated in an all-female federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, where the team is trained to deal with mental health problems. Her lawyers say they are not arguing that she did not deserve to be punished, but the jury never fully knew about her serious mental illness diagnosed by doctors.
In a nearly 7,000-page clemency petition filed this month with President Donald Trump, his lawyers say his mother’s alcoholism has caused her to be born with brain damage and “has resulted in significant and incurable psychiatric disabilities.” They also detailed Montgomery’s allegations of physical abuse, rape and torture at the hands of his stepfather and others and of being sexually trafficked by his mother.
“Everything in this case is extremely sad,” says the petition. “As human beings, we want to get away. It is easy to call Mrs. Montgomery bad and a monster, as the government did. She is neither one nor the other.”
Diane Mattingly, an older sister from Montgomery, told reporters last week that she too was sexually abused at home before being placed in an orphanage. She has been talking in recent months that her sister’s life must be spared.
“I went to a place where I was loved, cared for and demonstrated my worth,” said Mattingly. “I had a good foundation. Lisa didn’t, and she broke. She literally broke.”
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the judge’s decision to suspend execution. In October, the agency described the case as an “especially heinous” murder. The Missouri community where his victim lived met last month to remember Stinnett, with some expressing support for Montgomery’s execution.
The United States government last executed an inmate in 1953, when Bonnie Brown Heady, from Missouri, was sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of a young man in a rescue plan.
Montgomery was initially set to run in December, but the date was postponed after his lawyers, who are based in Nashville, Tennessee, contracted the coronavirus during a trip to Texas and working on his case.
The spread of Covid-19 through prisons, including in Terre Haute, Indiana, a facility where all federal executions take place, contributed to heightening criticism about the resumption of the federal death penalty last year under the Trump administration, even as states stopped. executions.
In addition to the execution of Montgomery, two other federal executions are scheduled to take place this week. So far, the government has sentenced 10 people to death in the past seven months, representing the highest number of executions in a weak presidential period in more than 130 years.
