[Ammi]

The US is set to execute a female federal inmate for the first time in 67 years, Donald Trump’s justice department has said.

Related: Alfre Woodard: 'We want all those with a stake in the death row business to see this film'

Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a Missouri woman in 2004 and stole her unborn baby, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the US penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on 8 December.

Montgomery, whose lawyers have long argued she has brain damage from beatings as a child and suffers from psychosis and other mental conditions, will become the first woman executed by the US government since Bonny Brown Heady in December 1953. Heady was convicted of kidnapping and killing the six-year-old heir of an automobile tycoon. With her boyfriend, she was executed in a gas chamber.

The attorney general, William Barr, announced the decision to proceed with the execution of Montgomery, 52, in a statement that also detailed a 10 December execution date for Brandon Bernard, 40, who with two accomplices was found guilty of the murder of two church ministers in Texas in 1999.

Barr said the crimes were “especially heinous murders”. Montgomery, who sliced open the belly of Bobby Jo Stinnett and took her daughter, is the only woman among 55 federal inmates awaiting execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Under Barr, seven executions of federal prisoners have taken place since July. Before that, only three inmates had been executed since the restoration of the federal death penalty in 1998, the Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and another in 2001, the other two years later.

In state prisons, 16 women have been executed since a 1976 supreme court decision lifted a moratorium on the death penalty across the US. The most recent was in September 2015, when Kelly Renee Gissendaner received a lethal injection in Georgia for the 1997 murder of her husband.

Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, attacked Barr’s decision as an “injustice”.

Related: Kelly Gissendaner: Georgia executes first woman for 70 years despite last-minute appeals

“In the grip of her mental illness, Lisa committed a terrible crime,” Henry, an assistant public defender in Nashville, Tennessee, said in a statement. “Yet she immediately expressed profound remorse and was willing to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence with no possibility of release.

“Lisa Montgomery has long accepted full responsibility for her crime, and she will never leave prison. But her severe mental illness and the devastating impacts of her childhood trauma make executing her a profound injustice.”

Now 16, Stinnett’s daughter, Victoria Jo, was raised by her father. In 2004, Montgomery’s husband said he was unaware the baby his wife brought home was not theirs.

“I had no idea,” Kevin Montgomery said. “I sure hope [the Stinnett family] get as much support from their church and community as I have because we are all going to need it.”


https://uk.yahoo.com/news/lisa-montg...191751869.html

[joeysteele]

I'm not an advocate of the death penalty myself.
Plus all murders are wrong and require as maximum of punishment as possible.

This murder was by all accounts really gruesome.

This is the States however.
Some States have the death penalty and others don't.

Females are as capable of horrific murders just as males, if the sentence is death in a State that has the death penalty, then she knew the consequences of her actions at the time of the horrific murder by her of another.

My only thought is I'm glad we in the UK don't have the death penalty.
One of the better positions we have left in the UK of the reducing number we have left of better things.

If I was an American in that State however, I wouldn't be losing a second of sleep that she was going to lose her life, she had no thought of the person she murdered.
Nor the child she took either really.

[parmnion]

Good

[arista]

She Murdered a woman.

It's the American Way.

[LaLaLand]

How come there’s such a massive space of time between conviction and death penalty? Always wondered.

Like some people are literally on “Death Row” for decades and decades.

[AnnieK]

Originally Posted by LaLaLand

How come there’s such a massive space of time between conviction and death penalty? Always wondered.

Like some people are literally on “Death Row” for decades and decades.

They go through loads of appeals and things I think so it takes time, each time an appeal is dismissed they launch another. You usually find that even on the day of execution they are in court trying to stop it until a final decision is made.

[MTVN]

How did she steal the unborn baby

[Cherie]

Originally Posted by MTVN

How did she steal the unborn baby

She did her own version of a c section, grim

[Niamh.]

Gruesome crime there's no doubt but I'm not in favour of the death penalty regardless of the sex of the person

[Kazanne]

Originally Posted by Cherie

She did her own version of a c section, grim

That baby is 16 years old now, poor girl knowing how she was born,as for that woman, you live by the sword ,you die by the sword, I kind of agree with Joey here.

[Tom4784]

If she is truly mentally ill (cutting out a baby from a woman's stomach doesn't strike me as sane behaviour) then it's barbaric to kill her. The death penalty is hypocritical and wrong especially if it comes to someone who wasn't in full control of her actions.

It would take a cruel and bloodthirsty person to read this story and think that the right course of action would be to kill this woman. Imprison her for life, for her own safety and others.