TERRE HAUTE After a flurry of last-minute court orders, hours of uncertainty and one final plea to reconsider her competency, Lisa Montgomery became the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years early Wednesday.
Montgomery, 52, was executed by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute. Her time of death was 1:31 a.m., more than seven hours after her originally scheduled time of execution.
As both sides filed appeal after appeal to tip the scales in their favor, Montgomery spent her final moments in a cell within just steps away from the execution chamber.
As a curtain was raised in the execution chamber, Montgomery looked momentarily bewildered as she glanced at journalists peering at her from behind thick glass in the observation room, according to the Associated Press. At the start of the execution process, an executioner standing over Montgomery's shoulder leaned over, gently removed her face mask and asked if she had any last words,
Montgomery responded with a quiet "no." She said nothing else, the AP reported.
She tapped her fingers nervously for several seconds, a heart-shaped tattoo on her thumb, but she otherwise showed no signs of distress, and quickly closed her eyes, the AP reported.
The pentobarbital lethal injection began to flow through IVs into both of Montgomery's arms at about 1:18 a.m. She licked her lips and briefly gasped, the AP reported. A few minutes later, her midsection briefly throbbed.
At 1:30 a.m., an official in black gloves with a stethoscope walked into the room, listened to her heart and chest, then walked out, the AP reported. She was pronounced dead a minute later.
The legal battles
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Montgomerys execution with a pair of orders issued just before midnight.
The high court lifted a stay of execution put in place by U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit and rejected a final stay application from Montgomery's lawyers.
Kelley Henry, Montgomery's federal public defender, said the federal government violated the Constitution, federal law and its own regulation to put her client to death.
The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight. Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame," she said in a statement provided to IndyStar just after midnight.
Henry reiterated her arguments that Montgomery endured severe physical and sexual abuse beginning in her childhood, and that she suffered from serious mental illness.
"Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution," Henry said. "The current administration knows this. And they killed her anyway."
Tuesdays legal battles began when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit declined to stay her execution less than 24 hours after a federal judge in Indiana granted a stay in her execution over concerns about her deteriorating mental health.
On Tuesday afternoon a judge with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit granted another stay, throwing Montgomery's execution further into question.
Around 8 p.m., the high court lifted the stay issued by the U.S.Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, but the Eighth Circuit stay remained in place until the near-midnight decisions by the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court repeatedly split along partisan lines, with liberal Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan ruling in ways that would have granted Montgomery a reprieve.
Her attorneys have said Montgomery endured severe physical and sexual abuse beginning in her childhood, and that she suffers from serious mental illness.
"And Lisa was much more than the tragic crime she committed, a crime for which she felt deep remorse before she lost all touch with reality in the days before her execution," Henry said. "Lisa was also much more than the horrors inflicted upon her, the sexual violence and abuse she endured at the hands of those who were supposed to love, nurture and protect her."
In 2004, Montgomery drove from her Melvern, Kansas, farmhouse to the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore under the guise of adopting a rat terrier puppy from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old dog breeder. She strangled Stinnett with a rope before performing a crude cesarean and fleeing with the baby.
Stinnett's family did not address the media following Montgomery's execution.
Montgomery, the lone woman on death row, is just the third woman executed by the federal government since 1900.
She joins Bonnie Brown Heady who was put to death in a gas chamber in December 1953 after for her role in the kidnapping and murder a multi-millionaire auto dealers 6-year-old son; and Ethel Rosenberg who was executed in June 1953 for trying to deliver war secrets to the Soviet Union.
Women have accounted for less than 4% of the nearly 16,000 executions carried out in the United States since the 1600s, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
The 11th execution
Montgomery is the first woman put to death by the federal government since 1953, but the 11th person put to death by the U.S. in the last seven months.
The blitz of 2020 executions under President Donald Trumps administration began in July when Daniel Lewis Lee became the first federal inmate to be executed since 2003, and ended in December with the deaths of Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois on consecutive days. Two more men are scheduled to be put to death this week.
All 11 inmates have been killed by lethal injection.
Like the executions before hers, anti-death penalty protesters made their presence known outside the Terre Haute penitentiary that houses federal death row before Montgomery's scheduled execution time.
With lawn chairs in tow in anticipation of a long night, members of the Terre Haute Death Penalty Resistance and other local demonstrators held signs and signaled to passing cars from the parking lot of a Dollar General store across the street from the main entrance of the federal prison.
The frustration at the federal government's continued pursuit of the death penalty, as well as the back-and-forth nature of Tuesday court proceedings, was palpable among the protestors.
"I think about Lisa all the time. I think about the fact that they brought her here and how terrified she must be because she doesn't know what's happening," said Karen Land of Indianapolis.
Land, who held a sign that read "STOP STATE KILLING," said she got involved with Terre Haute Death Penalty Resistance after a friend of hers who served as spiritual adviser for Orlando Hall during his Nov. 19 execution tested positive for coronavirus soon after.
Karen Burkhart of Plainfield called the death penalty a "violation of the right to life," and said those who wish to see it abolished must be as aggressive as the federal government has been in its efforts to carry it out.
"It's about the human rights that we have, and no one should take that away," she said. "It's a mistake for the government to kill citizens of its own country."
Associated Press reporter Michael Tarm contributed to this story.
Topeka Capital-Journal reporter Rafael Garcia contributed to this story.
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