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Lisa Montgomery, only woman on death row in US, to be executed on January 12

WION Web Team
Washington, United StatesUpdated: Jan 03, 2021, 06:33 PM IST
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Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be executed in the US after six decades. Photograph:(Reuters)

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She will be the first woman to be executed since 1953 and will be receiving a lethal injection as her final punishment for murdering the Missouri woman

A US appeals court has given a go-ahead for the execution of the only woman on federal death row before the President-elect Joe Biden takes oath on January 20.

Lisa Montgomery was scheduled to be put to death in December at the federal correctional complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

Montgomery was convicted of murdering Bobbie Jo Stinnett, an eight-months pregnant woman, in 2004 by strangling and then cutting out and kidnapping the baby. 

She will be the first woman to be executed since 1953 and will be receiving a lethal injection as her final punishment for murdering the Missouri woman.

US district court judge Randolph Moss had earlier ruled that the justice department of the US had unlawfully rescheduled her execution, and had ignored an order from the Direcotr of the Bureau of Prisons demanding her execution to be scheduled for January 12.

Now, the ruling has been handed over by a three-judge panel on the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit. 

Montgomery's legal team have argued that her mental condition was not stable and had urged the outgoing President Donald Trump to commute her death sentence. "Given the severity of Mrs Montgomery’s mental illness, the sexual and physical torture she endured throughout her life, and the connection between her trauma and the facts of her crime, we appeal to President Trump to grant her mercy and commute her sentence to life imprisonment,"  Sandra Babcock, one of her lawyers, said in an earlier statement.

As per the US Bureau of Prisons records, the last two women to ever be executed in the United States of America was Bonnie Brown Heady, who was executed on December 18, 1953 for kidnapping and murder, and Ethel Rosenberg who was executed for espionage. Her husband, too was executed.