Mental Health
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U.S. executes first woman on federal death row in nearly seven decades
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U.S. executes first woman on federal death row in nearly seven decades
The U.S. government executed convicted murderer Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, early on Wednesday, after the Supreme Court cleared the last hurdle for her execution by overturning a stay.
Montgomery’s execution marked the first time a female prisoner has been executed since 1953 in the United States.
She was pronounced deceased at 1:31 a.m. EST (0631 GMT) on Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Prisons said in a statement.
Challenges were fought across multiple federal courts on whether to allow execution of Montgomery, 52, who had initially been scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate on Tuesday in the Justice Department’s execution chamber at its prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Kelley Henry, Montgomery’s lawyer, called the 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,” Henry said in a statement.
Montgomery was convicted in 2007 in Missouri for kidnapping and strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then eight months pregnant. Montgomery cut Stinnett’s fetus from the womb. The child survived.
Some of Stinnett’s relatives traveled to witness Montgomery’s execution, the Justice Department said.
As the execution process began, asked by a female executioner if she had any last words, Montgomery responded in a quiet, muffled voice, “No,” according to a reporter who served as a media witness.
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 resumed last year under President Donald Trump, whose outspoken support for capital punishment long predates his entry into politics.
This will again divide so may people and why did it take so long for even the prison service to diagnose her mental health condition. The family would have felt cheated after the horrific killing of both the mother and the attempted murder of the baby.
Putting myself in their shoes, I would have wanted that sentence to be carried out but was justice truly served today?
Mental illness is a terrible thing when left untreated or undiagnosed, both her and the family were cheated by doctors who failed to spot this throughout her life, that is a tragedy for everyone.
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