Woman on death row at Fort Worth prison has execution date moved again amid legal battle
The only woman currently on federal death row, who is being held at a prison in Fort Worth, had her execution date delayed for the second time Monday.
Lisa Montgomery was set to be executed on Dec. 8. On Monday, the federal government rescheduled her execution for Jan. 12.
Montgomery’s execution date had already been moved once. Two of her lawyers caught COVID-19 while visiting Montgomery at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, and they filed a motion to delay her execution so they had more time to work on her clemency application. On Thursday, a judge approved the motion and moved the date to Dec. 31.
Montgomery’s attorneys are fighting for clemency for the 52-year-old woman, arguing that her mental illnesses, caused by a life of abuse and sexual assault, led her to have a psychotic breakdown and commit the crime that sent her to death row. Clemency is not the same as a pardon, but rather is the process by which a governor, president or administrative board uses their executive power to reduce a defendant’s sentence.
In 2007, Montgomery was convicted of strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett to death in Missouri. Stinnett was eight months pregnant, and Montgomery cut the baby out of her and kidnapped it. She had been telling family and friends she was pregnant, and tried to pass the baby — who survived — off as her own.
“Lisa Montgomery is (a) person with severe mental illness, and numerous experts have concluded that her crime was the product of a psychotic episode,” attorney Sandra Babcock said in a statement Monday. “It is difficult to grasp the extremity of the horrors Lisa suffered from her earliest childhood, including being raped by her stepfather, handed off to his friends for their use, sold to groups of adult men by her own mother and repeatedly gang raped, and relentlessly beaten and neglected.”
Montgomery would be the first woman executed in the United States in 67 years. A coalition of more than 1,000 supporters that include prosecutors, anti-sex trafficking and anti domestic violence groups, child advocates and mental health groups have urged President Donald Trump to stop her execution.
The ACLU is suing FMC Carswell’s warden — as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Attorney General William Barr and other top officials — over Montgomery’s conditions at the prison. In a lawsuit filed Nov. 6, the ACLU said Montgomery is being re-tortured by prison officials. She is kept in a solitary room where lights remain on 24/7. Her clothes were taken away and she was given a loose smock and denied undergarments, and male guards are able to watch her while she uses the bathroom, according to the lawsuit.
In a response to the lawsuit Friday, the BOP and other defendants denied that Montgomery’s conditions violate her rights and said the supervision, lights and other conditions were put in place to prevent Montgomery from trying to die by suicide.
Montgomery’s life of abuse
Babcock said she was “stunned” that Barr directed the Bureau of Prisons to schedule Montgomery’s execution during the pandemic, especially since her mental state is questionable. Montgomery has accepted full responsibility for the crime, and should not be executed, Babcock told the Star-Telegram in a previous interview.
“The crime itself is terribly tragic, and she has accepted full responsibility for that,” Babcock said. “But it simply is the truth that this crime would never have been committed but for her history of severe mental illness that was compounded by her trauma disorder that arose from the sexual violence that she experienced.”
On Monday, Montgomery’s half-sister, 57-year-old half-sister Diane Mattingly, wrote a plea for her sister’s life in Elle magazine.
“Lisa should spend the rest of her life in prison, no doubt, but she shouldn’t have to die,” Mattingly wrote on Elle.com. “Because maybe if she hadn’t been failed by the people she needed most in society, she could have been part of it.”
Montgomery was sexually abused and raped throughout her life, her lawyers said in the motion to have her execution delayed. When Montgomery was 15 years old, her mother began selling her for sex in exchange for utilities and other favors and services. To survive the attacks, Montgomery would dissociate mentally, attempting to escape from reality. This was the beginning of her mental illness, her lawyers say.
When Montgomery was in high school, her mother became involved with a new boyfriend who coerced Montgomery into marrying his 24-year-old son. The son raped and brutalized her. After she gave birth to her husband’s fourth child in less than five years, he and her mother forced Montgomery to be sterilized, according to the lawsuit.
Eventually, Montgomery and the man divorced — Montgomery killed Stinnett two days after he filed for custody of their children.
Mattingly, who was removed by Child Protective Services from her family’s home at 8 years old, said in her piece for Elle that Montgomery was “let down by people she’s supposed to trust” her entire life.
“My heart goes out to the family of Bobbie Jo, of course it does, but we need to break the chain of evil actions,” she wrote.
This story was originally published November 23, 2020 at 7:41 PM with the headline "Woman on death row at Fort Worth prison has execution date moved again amid legal battle."
