A Kansas woman was executed Wednesday for killing an expectant mother in Missouri and cutting the baby from her womb. For the first time in about seven decades, the U.S. government has put to death a female inmate.
What We Know:
- Lisa Montgomery, 52, was declared dead at 1:31 a.m. after receiving a lethal injection in the federal prison complex located at Terre Haute, Indiana.
- Since July, she was the 11th prisoner killed at the facility when President Donald Trump, a passionate advocate of capital punishment, resumed federal executions following 17 years without one.
- As the curtain was lifted in the execution chamber, Montgomery seemed momentarily confused as she looked at journalists looking at her from behind thick glass. A woman standing over her shoulder reached over and asked if she had any last words. “No,” Montgomery replied. She said nothing else.
- As the lethal injection initiated, Montgomery kept licking her lips and gasped briefly as pentobarbital, the lethal drug, entered her body via IVs on both arms. A few minutes later, her midsection palpitated for a moment but immediately stopped.
“The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight,” Kelley Henry, Montgomery’s attorney, expressed in a statement. “Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame.”
- It came after hours of legal arguing before the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to move forward.
- In 2004, Montgomery killed 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. She used a rope to choke Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant at the time, then cut out the baby girl from the womb with a kitchen knife. Montgomery took the child with her and tried to pass the baby girl off as her own.
Montgomery was the first of three federal prisoners programmed to die before next week’s installation of President-elect Joe Biden, who is expected to terminate federal executions.
