Published on: Tuesday, November 24, 2020

Last week, a federal court delayed Lisa Montgomery's December 8, 2020 execution after two of her attorneys became “virtually bed-ridden” with Covid-19 while visiting her in prison. The delay was granted so her attorneys can recover from the virus and file a clemency petition on her behalf. Previous coverage available here. The government now plans to execute the first female inmate in almost six decades on January 12, 2021, just days before President-elect Joe Biden takes office on January 20, 2021 (article available here).

With the new execution date, Lisa Montgomery, 49, would be one of three federal inmates scheduled to be killed by the government that week. Cory Johnson and Dustin Higgs are scheduled to be killed on January 14 and 15 respectively, while two other executions are scheduled for December.

Montgomery’s lawyers have argued that their client suffers from serious mental illnesses. Bourgeois and Johnson suffer from intellectual disabilities and Higgs didn't pull the trigger to kill anyone. Instead, the man who admitted firing the weapon was tried separately and was sentenced to life in prison.

If the Justice Department plan moves forward, 13 people will have been killed by the federal government by lethal injection during the Trump administration. Legal experts who follow capital punishment said that would be the most since the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who served 12 years in office (and had 16 executions under his direction) before his death in 1945.

Until last week, when Orlando Hall was killed at the federal death chamber in Indiana, there had been no "lame-duck" federal executions in more than a century.