The US government has executed convicted murderer Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, after the Supreme Court cleared the last hurdle for her execution by overturning a stay.
In a statement, the US Justice Department said: “Lisa Montgomery, 52, was executed at the US Penitentiary Terre Haute in accordance with the capital sentence unanimously recommended by a federal jury and imposed by the US District Court for the Western District of Missouri in 2007.”
Montgomery’s execution marked the first time the US government has implemented the death sentence for a female prisoner since 1953.
Challenges were fought across multiple federal courts on whether to allow execution of Montgomery, who had initially been scheduled to be executed by lethal injection yesterday in the Justice Department’s execution chamber at its prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Kelley Henry, Montgomery’s lawyer, had called the pending execution, “vicious, unlawful, and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power.”
“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,” Ms Henry had said in a statement.
Montgomery was convicted in 2007 in Missouri for kidnapping and murdering Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then eight months pregnant.
Montgomery cut the baby from Ms Stinnett’s womb. The child survived.
Some of Ms Stinnett’s relatives travelled to witness Montgomery’s execution, the Justice Department said.
Montgomery’s lawyers asked for clemency last week, saying she committed her crime after a childhood in which she was abused and repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends, and so should instead face life in prison.
It is one of three executions the US Department of Justice had scheduled for the final full week of President Donald Trump’s administration.
Two other executions scheduled for tomorrow and Friday have been delayed, for now at least, by a federal judge in Washington, to allow them to recover from Covid-19.
Federal executions had been on pause for 17 years and only three men had been executed by the federal government since 1963 until the practice was resumed last year under Mr Trump, whose outspoken support for capital punishment long predates his entry into politics.