Appeals Court revalidates execution of Lisa Montgomery on January 12 for taking a baby from a pregnant woman | The State
Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to the federal death penalty.
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Wyandotte County Sheriff / EFE
Lisa montgomery, the woman condemned to the death penalty at the federal level for murdering a pregnant woman in Missouri and taking her baby, will be executed by lethal injection before the president-elect Joe Biden officially take office.
A panel of three judges from the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, concluded that the district judge, Randolph Moss, he was wrong when he struck down Montgomery’s execution date in an order last week.
The convict, who is the only woman on federal death row, will be executed on January 12, according to the Associated Press report.
Moss ruled that the Department of Justice irregularly rescheduled Montgomery’s execution and overturned an order from the director of the Bureau of Prisons scheduling his death for that date at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Initially, Montgomery’s execution was scheduled for last December. But Moss delayed the process after the woman’s attorneys contracted coronavirus and asked her to extend the time to file a clemency petition.
The appeals panel, asked by attorney Meaghan VerGow to review the request, disagreed with the district judge’s decision.
Montgomery is serving a capital sentence for killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23 years old, in Skidmore, Missouri, in December 2004. The condemned woman strangled the victim, who was eight months pregnant, with a rope and then extracted the girl from the uterus with a knife. The baby survived.
Montgomery’s defense has argued that her client suffers from serious mental illness due to the pattern of physical and sexual violence she suffered from as a child.
UN objection
A panel of the United Nations (UN) he recently spoke out against the execution of the woman, now 52 years old.
The entity raised through the group that the defendant’s history of mental trauma was not presented during her trial in 2007 as extenuating circumstances for her sentence.
“Ms. Montgomery was the victim of an extreme level of physical and sexual abuse throughout her life against which the state never provided protection and for which it did not offer solutions,” said the UN panel through a press release from the UN Office for Human Rights, OHCHR.
“Ms. Montgomery was subjected to multiple rapes from the age of 11 and forced into prostitution at 15. She later married and was subjected to further abuse, some of which is captured on video. She had four children before being pressured to have her sterilized against her will. By the age of 34, he had moved 61 times. As a result of the trauma he experienced, he developed several serious mental conditions for which he did not have access to treatment ”, they add.
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