TERRE HAUTE, Ind. (AP) – U.S. government plans to carry out its first execution of a female inmate in nearly seven decades were suspended Tuesday amid a barrage of legal resolutions and two other planned executions were halted. later this week because inmates tested positive for COVID-19.
The three executions were to be the last before President-elect Joe Biden, an opponent of the federal death penalty, is sworn in next week. It is now unclear how many additional executions there will be under President Donald Trump, who resumed federal executions in July after a 17-year hiatus. Ten federal inmates have been killed since then.
Lisa Montgomery faced execution Tuesday for killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, in the city of Skidmore, northwest Missouri. kitchen knife. Montgomery took the boy with her and tried to leave her as his own.
But an appeals court granted the stay of execution on Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted the sentence of an Indiana judge who considered he was probably mentally ill and could not. understand that they would kill her. If a higher court reinstated the execution, Montgomery, the only woman in the federal death row, would receive a lethal injection at a federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Aside from that, a federal judge in the U.S. District of Columbia arrested the executions scheduled later this week for Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs in a sentencing Tuesday. Johnson, convicted of the murder of seven people related to his drug trafficking in Virginia, and Higgs, convicted of ordering the murder of three women in Maryland, tested positive for COVID-19 last month.
Delays in any of the executions scheduled for this week beyond Biden’s takeover next Tuesday would likely mean they won’t happen soon, or ever, as a Biden administration is expected to oppose the realization. of federal death sentences.
One of Montgomery’s attorneys, Kelley Henry, told The Associated Press on Tuesday morning that her client arrived at the Terre Haute facility Monday night from a Texas jail and that, as she did not there are facilities for female inmates, they kept her in a cell in the same building as the execution chamber.
“I don’t think he has any rational understanding of what’s going on,” Henry said.
Montgomery has made needlepoint in prison, making gloves, hats and other knitwear as gifts for his lawyers and others, Henry said. He has not been able to continue with this hobby or read since his glasses were removed out of concern that he might commit suicide.
“All of his coping mechanisms were withdrawn when they closed it” in October, when he was informed he had an execution date, Henry said.
Montgomery’s legal team says she suffered “sexual torture,” including group rapes, when she was a child, which emotionally healed her and exacerbated her family’s mental health problems.
At trial, prosecutors accused Montgomery of falsifying mental illness, noting that his murder of Stinnett was premeditated and included meticulous planning, including online investigation into how to perform a cesarean.
Henry mocked this idea, citing exhaustive tests and brain scans that supported the diagnosis of mental illness.
“Brain scans that show brain damage cannot be falsified,” he said.
Henry said the fundamental question of legal arguments is not whether he knew the murder was wrong in 2004, but whether he understands why he is scheduled to be executed now.
In his ruling on a stay, U.S. District Judge James Patrick Hanlon in Terre Haute cited defense experts who alleged Montgomery suffered from depression, borderline personality disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder.
Montgomery, the judge wrote, also suffered during the time of the murder an extremely rare condition called pseudocysis in which the false belief of a woman who is pregnant causes hormonal and physical changes as if she were actually pregnant.
Montgomery also experiences delusions and hallucinations, believing God spoke to her through connection puzzles, the judge said, citing defense experts.
“The record before the Court contains sufficient evidence to indicate that Ms. Montgomery’s current mental state is so divorced from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government’s reasons for her execution,” the judge said.
The government has acknowledged Montgomery’s mental problems, but argues it cannot understand that she was executed for killing someone else because of them.
Sometimes the details of the crime left jurors in tears during their trial.
Prosecutors told the jury that Montgomery drove approximately 274 miles from his farmhouse in Melvern, Kansas, to the city of Skidmore, northwest Missouri, under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy. Stinnett. Stinnett choked on a raw cesarean and ran away with the baby.
Prosecutors said Stinnett regained consciousness and tried to defend himself while Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the girl from her belly. Later that day, Montgomery called her husband to pick her up in the parking lot of a Long John Silver’s in Topeka, Kansas, telling him 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 infant, 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 been subjected to a tubal ligation that made her infertile and planned to reveal that she lied about being pregnant in an effort to get custody of two of her four children. . Needing a baby before a fast-approaching court date, Montgomery turned his attention to Stinnett, whom he had met at dog shows.
Anti-death penalty groups said Trump was pushing for executions ahead of the November election in a cynical bid to burn the reputation of a law and order leader.
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.
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Hollingsworth reported from Kansas.