TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) – The US government’s plans to carry out the first execution of a female prisoner in nearly seventy years were put on hold Tuesday amid a series of legal rulings, and two other executions scheduled for later this week , were discontinued because the inmates tested positive for COVID-19.
The three executions would be the last before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, is sworn in next week. Now it is unclear how many additional executions will take place under President Donald Trump, who resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus. Ten federal inmates have since been put to death.
Lisa Montgomery was executed on Tuesday for the 2004 murder of 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the town of Skidmore in northwestern Missouri. She used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and then cut the baby girl from the baby. uterus with a kitchen knife. Montgomery took the child and tried to pass the girl on as her own.
But an appeals court on Tuesday granted a stay of execution, shortly after another appeals court overturned the ruling of an Indiana judge who found that she was likely mentally ill and could not comprehend that she would be put to death. If a higher court resets the execution, Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, would be given a lethal injection at a federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Separately, a federal judge from the U.S. District of Columbia halted the planned executions of Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs later this week in a ruling on Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of killing seven people in connection with his Virginia drug trade, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murder of three women in Maryland, both tested positive for COVID-19 last month.
Delays to one of this week’s scheduled executions following Biden’s inauguration next Tuesday would likely mean they won’t happen anytime soon, if ever, as a Biden government is expected to oppose the execution of federal death sentences.
One of Montgomery’s attorneys, Kelley Henry, told The Associated Press Tuesday morning that her client arrived at the Terre Haute facility late Monday night from a Texas jail and that, because there are no facilities for female inmates, she was being held in a cell in the execution chamber itself.
“I don’t think she has any rational understanding of what’s going on,” said Henry.
Montgomery made needlework in prison by making gloves, hats and other knits as gifts for her attorneys and others, Henry said. She has not been able to continue with that hobby or read since her glasses were taken from her out of concern she might kill herself.
“All of her coping mechanisms were taken from her when they locked her up,” when she was told she had an execution date, Henry said.
Montgomery’s legal team says she suffered “ sexual torture, ” including gang rape, as a child, which left her permanently emotionally scarred and exacerbated the mental health problems in her family.
During the trial, prosecutors accused Montgomery of faking mental illness, noting that her murder of Stinnett was premeditated and involved meticulous planning, including online investigations into conducting a caesarean section.
Henry opposed that idea, citing extensive tests and brain scans that supported the diagnosis of mental illness.
“You can’t fake brain scans that show the brain damage,” she said.
Henry said the crux of the legal arguments is not whether she knew the 2004 murder was wrong, but whether she fully understands why she will now be executed.
In his ruling on a stay, US District Judge James Patrick Hanlon in Terre Haute quoted defense experts as claiming that Montgomery suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Montgomery, the judge wrote, was also suffering from an extremely rare condition called pseudocyesis around the time of the murder, in which a woman’s false belief that she is pregnant triggers hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.
Montgomery also experiences delusions and hallucinations, believing God spoke to her through connect-the-dot puzzles, the judge said, referring to defense experts.
“The file before the Court contains sufficient evidence that Ms. Montgomery’s current mental state is so detached from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government’s rationale for her execution,” the judge said.
The government has acknowledged Montgomery’s mental problems, but disputes that it cannot comprehend that she is about to be executed for murdering another person because of them.
Details of the crime sometimes left jurors in tears at her trial.
Prosecutors told the jury that Montgomery had driven about 170 miles from her farm in Melvern, Kansas, to the town of Skidmore in northwestern Missouri under the guise of adopting a Stinnett rat terrier puppy. She strangled Stinnett as she performed a gross caesarean section and fled with the baby.
Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend herself while Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the girl from her womb. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in a Long John Silver’s parking lot in Topeka, Kansas, telling him she had delivered the baby earlier in the day at a nearby birth center.
Montgomery was arrested the next day after showing the premature baby, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old and has not spoken publicly about the tragedy.
Prosecutors said the motive was that Montgomery’s ex-husband knew she had undergone a tubal ligation that rendered her infertile and planned to reveal that she lied about her pregnancy in an attempt to get custody of two of their four children. Needing a baby for a fast-approaching court date, Montgomery turned her attention to Stinnett, whom she’d met at dog shows.
Anti-death penalty groups said Trump was pushing for pre-election executions in November in a cynical attempt to destroy a reputation as a leader of law and order.
The last woman to be 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 Kelly Gissendaner, 47, was in Georgia on September 30, 2015. She was convicted of murder in the 1997 murder of her husband after she conspired with her lover, who stabbed Douglas Gissendaner to death.
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Hollingsworth reported from Kansas.