Women are scarce on death row in the United States. According to a quarterly report from the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, only 2 percent of death row inmates are women. With Montgomery’s execution, there are now no women on federal death row.
The last women to be executed by the federal government were Bonnie Brown Heady for kidnapping and murder and Ethel Rosenberg for espionage, both in 1953.
Ms. Montgomery’s execution was originally scheduled for last month. But after two of his lawyers contracted the coronavirus, a judge postponed it and the Justice Department rescheduled.
In her last days, Mrs. Montgomery found some temporary relief in the courts. Her lawyers claimed she was incompetent for execution, citing mental illness, neurological disability and complex trauma. A federal judge in Indiana issued a suspension Monday night so that the court could conduct a hearing to determine its jurisdiction. But a panel at the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals canceled that stay on Tuesday, writing that Montgomery’s complaint could have been filed earlier. Judges also cited the Supreme Court’s precedent, which emphasizes that last-minute suspensions of execution “should be the extreme exception, not the norm.”
Still, other court orders continued to block his execution well after the provisionally scheduled execution time for the Bureau of Prisons at 6 pm. The Federal Death Penalty Law and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals issued their own suspension.
But the Supreme Court paved the way for the execution to continue, as it did for the 10 previous inmates executed by the Trump administration. On Monday, the court overturned both suspensions, the remaining barriers to execution, and rejected each of Ms. Montgomery’s requests for pardons.
In a long statement, Ms. Montgomery’s longtime lawyer, Kelley Henry, said the government broke the law by executing her client, who suffered from “debilitating mental illness”. In addition to the crime for which he expressed remorse and the abuses he suffered, said Henry, Montgomery was a Christian who adored her family.