US executes first woman in almost seven decades

The only woman on federal death row in the US has been executed.

Convicted murderer Lisa Montgomery was put to death early yesterday, after the Supreme Court cleared the last obstacle to her execution by overturning a stay.

She was the first woman to receive the death penalty in the US since 1953.

She was pronounced dead at 1.31am Eastern Standard Time (10.31am Gulf Standard Time) yesterday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said.

Montgomery was convicted in 2004 in Missouri for kidnapping and strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then eight months pregnant. Montgomery cut Stinnett’s foetus from the womb. The child survived.

Some of the victim’s relatives travelled to witness Montgomery’s execution, the Justice Department said.

Challenges were fought across several federal courts on whether to allow Montgomery’s execution.

She was put to death with an injection of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate, in the Justice Department’s execution chamber at its prison in

Terre Haute, Indiana. Asked by an executioner if she had any last words, Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled “no,” said a reporter who served as a media witness.

Montgomery’s lawyer, Kelley Henry, called the execution a “vicious, unlawful and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power,” citing her client’s mental state.

“No one can credibly dispute Mrs Montgomery’s long- standing debilitating mental disease, diagnosed and treated for the first time by the Bureau of Prisons’ own doctors,” Ms Henry said.

Federal executions were on hold for 17 years and only three men were executed by the federal government since 1963 until the practice resumed last year under President Donald Trump, an outspoken supporter of capital punishment.

Montgomery’s lawyers asked for presidential clemency last week, saying she committed her crime after a childhood in which she was beaten and repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends.