TERRE HAUTE, Indiana – A Kansas woman was executed on Tuesday for strangling a future mother in Missouri and cutting the baby out of her womb, the first time in nearly seven decades that the United States government has sentenced an inmate to death.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, was pronounced dead at 1:31 am on Wednesday morning after receiving a lethal injection at the federal penitentiary complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was the 11th prisoner to receive a lethal injection since July, when President Donald Trump, a fervent defender of capital punishment, resumed federal executions after 17 years without one.
“The cowardly bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight,” Kelley Henry, Montgomery’s lawyer, said in a statement. “Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should be ashamed.”
“The government did not stop at anything in its zeal to kill this wounded and delusional woman,” said Henry. “Lisa Montgomery’s execution was far from fair.”
After hours of legal disputes, the Supreme Court paved the way for the execution to proceed. Montgomery was the first of the last three federal prisoners scheduled to die before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden next week, who is expected to suspend federal executions.
But a federal judge in the 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.
Montgomery killed 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.
An appeals court granted Montgomery a suspension of execution on Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court suspended the decision of an Indiana judge who concluded that she was probably mentally ill and could not understand that she would be put to death. But both appeals were suspended, allowing the execution of the only woman on federal death row.
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 triggers 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 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 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.