Killer who cut baby from mother’s womb executed
A MURDERER who cut an unborn baby from its mother has become the first female prisoner to be executed by the US government since 1953.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, was put to death by lethal injection at a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, shortly after 6.30am UK time yesterday.
In 2004, she strangled 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, before cutting out and kidnapping her baby in Missouri. The child was later recovered alive.
Some of Ms Stinnett’s family travelled to witness the death of Montgomery, who was tried and convicted in 2007.
Asked by a female executioner if she had any last words, the killer reportedly replied in a quiet, muffled voice: ‘No.’
Her lawyer Kelley Henry described the execution as a ‘vicious, unlawful and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power’.
She said: ‘No-one can credibly dispute Mrs Montgomery’s longstanding debilitating mental disease – diagnosed and treated for the first time by the Bureau of Prisons’ own doctors.’
Montgomery had launched a series of legal challenges in the 13 years since she was sentenced to death.
However, the US Supreme Court, which now has a conservative major
ity, reversed a stay of execution that had been put in place by a lower court.
Only three executions had been ordered by the federal government – rather than individual US states – between 1963 and 2019.
But ten were carried out last year under Donald Trump, a long-standing advocate of capital punishment.
Montgomery’s lawyers had appealed to the president for clemency last week, saying she committed her crime after being abused and raped by her stepdad and his friends as a child. Her
execution was one of three scheduled for the final full week of Mr Trump’s spell in the White House.
Two others have been delayed to allow the condemned murderers to recover from Covid-19.