By Sammie Jones-
A mentally ill woman who was abused as a child and on death row, has been executed.
Lisa Montgomery – the only female inmate on federal death row in the US – has been executed for murder. Her lawyers said she was psychotic and out of touch with reality.
She was 11th prisoner to receive a lethal injection there since July when Donald Trump, resumed federal executions after 17-years.
Since 2008, Montgomery had been held in a federal prison in Texas for female inmates with special needs, where she has been receiving psychiatric care. She was placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell since receiving her execution date.
Her lawyers say she was violently subjected to sexually and physically abuse by her father and trafficked by her mother.
Ms Montgomery received a lethal injection at a prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, after a last-minute stay of execution was lifted by the US Supreme Court.
She was executed for strangling a pregnant woman before cutting out and kidnapping her baby in Missouri in 2004. The family of her victim, 23 year old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, say she deserved to be put to death. Tragic Stinnet bled to death.
Montgomery is the first female federal inmate to be put to death by the US government in 67 years.
The latest execution was postponed twice, initially by Covid-19, then by a judge – until a Supreme Court ruling cleared the way for it to take place in the early hours of Wednesday.
Late on Monday, a judge in Indiana had halted the scheduled injection until a mental competency hearing could be held.
Her lawyers argued that she had been born brain-damaged and was too mentally ill to be executed.
She was also sexually and physically abused by her father and trafficked by her mother, family members said. Her treatment was so violent that it amounted to torture, her lawyers say.
Since 2008, Montgomery had been held in a federal prison in Texas for female inmates with special needs, where she has been receiving psychiatric care. Since receiving her execution date, she’d been placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell.
Outlaw
The Supreme Court outlawed the death penalty at state and federal level in 1972 but reversed the decision four years later. Since 1976, 16 women other than Lisa Montgomery have been executed but all by individual states rather than by the government.
Before Montgomery’s execution, the last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.