US set to execute first woman in nearly 70 years
It's been nearly 70 years since the United States executed a woman.
Lisa Montgomery was convicted of killing pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, in Missouri in December 2004. Montgomery strangled Stinnett, cut open her abdomen with a kitchen knife and removed the fetus, which survived.
Montgomery was scheduled to be executed Tuesday, but a court ruling threw that date into question unless the Terre Haute, Indiana, penitentiary that houses federal death row abides by stricter COVID-19 precautions or another judge intervenes.
Montgomery would be the third woman executed by the federal government since 1900.
Women account for less than 4% of the nearly 16,000 executions carried out in the USA since the 1600s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
"Any time a woman is being executed, it is out of the ordinary," said Richard Dunham, executive director of DPIC.
Out of 14 other cases in which a woman killed a pregnant woman with the intent of taking the unborn child, only one was sentenced to death, and that sentence was commuted to life, according to the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide.
The type of crimes eligible for the death penalty, such as murder with aggravating circumstances, are most often committed by men, Dunham said.
According to FBI data, 12% of people arrested for murder or non-negligent manslaughter in 2019 were women.
From 1973 to 2018, women accounted for 2.1% of those who received a death sentence, at the federal and state levels.
As of Jan. 1, there were 53 women and 2,567 men on death rows across the United States, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.
Dunham said the rarity of women being sentenced to death or executed might be in part because of mitigating circumstances, or those factors weighed by a court in the defendant's favor. Those include a history of abuse and severe mental illness.
"It doesn't necessarily mean that the death penalty discriminates in favor of women, but there are a number of factors that lead to a small percentage of death row being women," Dunham said.
According to a study published in 2017 by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 66% of female prisoners had a history of mental illness, compared with 35% of men.
According to advocates and her attorneys, Montgomery was born with brain damage, and beginning when she was a child, she was molested, raped, beaten and trafficked.
Kelley Henry, Montgomery's federal public defender, said Montgomery's trial attorney failed to understand and present her history of abuse and mental illness to the jury.
Henry said the attorney mistakenly leaned into gender norms and tried to paint Montgomery as "a very traditional good mother." Montgomery had four children.
Prosecutors used Montgomery's mental illness "that caused her to not be able to function to prove that she wasn't a good woman, she wasn't a good wife, she didn't fulfill these gender norms," Henry said.
Susan Sharp, a sociology professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies women and the death penalty, said it's not uncommon for prosecutors to play into gender norms when women are on trial.
"If you read the arguments made by prosecutors in their closing arguments in cases where they're seeking the death penalty for a woman, that's a very common thing to argue," Sharp said, "that not only did they commit a serious crime, but that it was a violation of true womanhood in a very Victorian sense."
Montgomery would be the 11th federal inmate put to death since the Department of Justice resumed executions in July after a nearly 20-year hiatus.
"We do not mean to suggest that Mrs. Montgomery should not be punished," attorneys wrote in a clemency petition to President Donald Trump. "She should. We do not make excuses for her actions.
“Everything about this case is overwhelmingly sad. As human beings we want to turn away. It is easy to call Mrs. Montgomery evil and a monster, as the Government has.
"She is neither."