Lisa Montgomery, sentenced to death for killing a pregnant woman to steal her fetus, could become the first woman executed by federal justice since 1953.
Lawyers for an American woman who will be executed next week sent a petition on her behalf to President Donald Trump on Tuesday to obtain a pardon, arguing that she was raped in a group when she was a child and suffering from mental disorders. .
Lisa Montgomery, sentenced to death for killing a pregnant woman to steal her fetus, could become the first woman executed by federal justice since 1953.
Without denying the gravity of the facts, his relatives and lawyers asked the outgoing president to commute his sentence to life imprisonment. This “would send an important message (…) about the need to come to the aid of victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse,” they based their request.
Lisa Montgomery: She killed a pregnant woman and is the first woman to be executed in the United States since 1953
According to them, “her life was full of inconceivable terror”: she was a teenage victim of gang rapes committed by her stepfather and friends, then “sold” to other men by her alcoholic and violent mother. Married at age 18 to her half-brother, she would have suffered more abuse.
The Republican government resumed federal executions last July, after a 17-year hiatus, and has been executing them at a steady pace since then.
Considering that Montgomery’s crime was “particularly heinous,” justice set a January 12 date for his execution, eight days before Trump had to leave the White House to hand it over to the Democrat. Joe Biden.
Read more: The crime committed by Daniel Lewis Lee, the first executed in the US after 17 years
In 2004, Montgomery wanted to have a child with her new husband, but could not, as she had undergone a tubal ligation a few years earlier.
He then met an eight-month-old pregnant woman in a chat room and went home to Missouri on the pretext of buying her a dog. Instead, he strangled her before cutting off her uterus and left her wrapped in a pool of blood.
She then managed to escape with the girl, who survived, but was nevertheless arrested the next day.