Womb raider Lisa Montgomery to be executed in December after 13 years on death row
After 13 years on death row, murderer Lisa Montgomery, who cut a baby from her victim’s womb, has been given a date for her execution.
After more than a decade on death row, convicted murderer Lisa Montgomery will be killed in less than two months after the date for her execution was set.
Montgomery, 51, has been in jail since December 2004 for brutally killing and cutting a baby from Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s womb.
She was convicted of kidnapping and murder and sentenced to death in 2007.
Montgomery has spent years on death row as her lawyers argued the abuse she suffered as a child and her severe mental illness means her sentence should be commuted to life in prison.
However unless her lawyers can appeal for a stay on her execution, Montgomery will be put to death by lethal injection on December 8 at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
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In 2007, a US District Court in Missouri sentenced Montgomery to death after finding her guilty of a federal kidnapping resulting in death.
Her lawyer, Kelley Henry, said that Montgomery deserves to live because she is mentally ill and suffered childhood abuse.
“Lisa Montgomery has long accepted full responsibility for her crime, and she will never leave prison,” Ms Henry said in a statement to Reuters.
“But her severe mental illness and the devastating impacts of her childhood trauma make executing her a profound injustice.”
Montgomery met her victim Bobbi Jo Stinnett online under the pretence of wanting to buy a dog.
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The two began speaking in a chatroom with Montgomery lying and claiming she was pregnant.
Ms Stinnett, then 23, was eight months pregnant when she agreed to let Montgomery visit her home in Skidmore, Missouri to buy a dog.
After arriving at the home, Montgomery strangled Ms Stinnett with a rope before cutting the eight-month-old baby from her womb.
Ms Stinnett’s mother discovered her hours later.
Montgomery was arrested the next day and the newborn baby, who miraculously survived, was given back to Ms Stinnett’s father and her heartbroken partner Zeb.
Montgomery had tried to pass off Ms Stinnett’s baby as her own, telling her husband she had gone into labour and had given birth at a nearby medical centre.
At Montgomery’s murder trial in 2007, the court heard Ms Stinnett had been conscious when her baby was cut from her womb.
“The only good thing that comes from this tragedy is that little Victoria is a healthy baby and is reunited with her family,” US lawyer John F. Wood said at the time.
Victoria is now 16 and lives with her father.
The US Justice Department also scheduled another execution on December 10 for Brandon Bernard, who, with his accomplices, murdered two youth ministers in 1999.
The two executions will be the eighth and ninth the federal government has carried out in 2020.
The Trump administration ended an informal 17-year-hiatus in federal executions in July, after announcing last year that the Bureau of Prisons was switching to a new single-drug protocol for lethal injections, from a three-drug combination it last used in 2003.
The new protocol revived long-running legal challenges to lethal injections.
In August, a federal judge in Washington D.C. ruled the Justice Department was violating the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act in not seeking a doctor’s prescription to administer the highly regulated barbiturate.
But an appeals court held the violation did not in itself amount to “irreparable harm” and allowed federal executions to proceed.
Bernard’s lawyer, Robert Owen, said in a statement the federal government misled the jury in the US District Court for the Western District of Texas, which in 2000 found Bernard guilty of murder. Its decision was tainted by false testimony, Mr Owen said.
“This evidence confirms that Mr Bernard is simply not one of the ‘worst of the worst’ offenders for whom we reserve the death penalty, and that sparing his life would pose no risk to anyone,” Mr Owen said.
If Montgomery is executed on December 8, she will be the first woman put to death in almost 70 years.
The US Justice Department confirmed it had scheduled its first female federal execution since 1953.
The last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who was put to death in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
Heady and her boyfriend Carl Hall were sentenced to death after kidnapping and killing six-year-old Bobby Greenlease.
Bobby was the son of multi-millionaire car dealer Robert Greenlease and was kidnapped from his Kansas City school after Heady pretended to be his aunt.
The couple demanded $US600,000 ($US5.7 million or $A8 million today) in ransom, which Mr Greenlease paid, but Bobby had already been shot to death anyway.
The massive payment was the largest ransom in American history at the time.
– with wires
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