US executes first woman since 1953

A Kansas woman who briefly won a reprieve earlier this week from an Indiana federal judge was executed early Wednesday morning in Terre Haute for strangling an expectant mother in Missouri and cutting the baby from her womb. It was the first time in nearly seven decades that the U.S. government has put to death a female inmate.

Lisa Montgomery, 52, was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute. She was the 11th prisoner executed at the facility since July when President Donald Trump, an ardent supporter of capital punishment, resumed federal executions following 17 years without one.

As a curtain was raised in the execution chamber, Montgomery looked momentarily bewildered as she glanced at journalists peering at her from behind thick glass. A woman standing over her shoulder leaned over, gently removed Montgomery’s face mask and asked if she had any last words.

“No,” Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice. She said nothing else.

She tapped her fingers nervously for several seconds — a heart-shaped tattoo on her thumb — showed no signs of distress, and quickly closed her eyes. As the lethal injection began, Montgomery kept licking her lips and gasped briefly as pentobarbital, the lethal drug, entered her body through IVs on both arms. A few minutes later, her midsection throbbed for a moment, but quickly stopped.

Montgomery lay on a gurney in the pale-green execution chamber, her glasses on and her grayish brown hair spilling over a green medical pillow. At 1:30 a.m., an official in black gloves with a stethoscope walked into the room, listened to her heart and chest, then walked out. She was pronounced dead a minute later.

“The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight,” Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, said in a statement. “Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame.”

“The government stopped at nothing in its zeal to kill this damaged and delusional woman,” Henry said. “Lisa Montgomery’s execution was far from justice.”

It came after hours of legal wrangling before the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to move forward. Montgomery was the first of the final three federal inmates scheduled to die before next week’s inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who is expected to discontinue federal executions.

Southern District of Indiana Chief Judge Jane Magnus-Stinson blocked Montgomery’s execution in an order issued Monday, holding courts should first make a competency determination before carrying out her execution.

In a separate ruling Tuesday, which the government can still seek to overturn, another federal judge halted the scheduled executions later this week of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people related to his drug trafficking in Virginia, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murders of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for COVID-19 last month.

The men’s attorneys argued that lung damage caused by the coronavirus would make it more likely that the lethal injection would cause them severe pain. If they aren’t executed before Biden becomes president, they may likely never be put to death.

Montgomery killed 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore in 2004. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months’ pregnant, and then cut the baby girl from the womb with a kitchen knife. Montgomery took the child with her and attempted to pass the girl off as her own.

An appeals court granted Montgomery a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death. But both appeals were lifted, allowing the execution to go forward.

As the only woman on federal death row, Montgomery had been held in a prison in Texas and was brought to Terre Haute on Monday night.

Montgomery’s legal team says she suffered “sexual torture” for years, including gang rapes, as a child, permanently scarring her emotionally and exacerbating mental-health issues that ran in her family.

At trial, prosecutors accused Montgomery of faking mental illness, noting her killing of Stinnett was premeditated and included meticulous planning, including online research on how to perform a C-section.

Henry balked at that idea, citing brain scans that supported the diagnosis of mental illness. She said the issue at the core of legal arguments was not whether she knew the killing was wrong in 2004 but whether she fully grasped why she was to be executed.

According to her lawyers, Montgomery suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. At around the time of the killing, they say she had a rare condition called pseudocyesis in which a woman’s false belief she is pregnant triggers hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.

Montgomery also experienced delusions and hallucinations, believing God spoke with her through connect-the-dot puzzles, defense experts said.

Details of the crime at times left jurors in tears during her trial.

Prosecutors told the jury Montgomery drove about 170 miles from her Melvern, Kansas, farmhouse to the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy from Stinnett. She strangled Stinnett, performed a crude cesarean and fled with the baby.

Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend herself as Montgomery cut the baby girl from her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband from Topeka, Kansas, telling him she had delivered the baby earlier in the day at a birthing center.

Montgomery was arrested the next day after showing off the premature infant, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and hasn’t spoken publicly about the tragedy.

Anti-death penalty groups said Trump pushed for executions prior to the November election in a cynical bid to burnish a reputation as a law-and-order leader.

The last woman executed by the federal government was Bonnie Brown Heady on Dec. 18, 1953, for the kidnapping and murder of a 6-year-old boy, also in Missouri.