(November 23, 2020) After a federal court ordered a temporary delay to allow her attorneys to recover from COVID-19, the federal government has rescheduled for January 12, 2021 the execution of Lisa Montgomery, a person with severe mental illness and a history of horrific trauma who is the only woman under a federal death sentence.
Mrs. Montgomery’s mental health has been deteriorating since the government first set her execution date. She is being held under extremely harsh conditions, dressed in a “suicide smock,” given only a crayon to write with, and threatened with the loss of her underwear if she exhibits any distress. Even as her attorneys are still recovering from severe COVID-19, they are trying to monitor her fragile mental state and prepare a clemency petition that provides a full picture of how her lifetime of suffering physical, emotional, and sexual abuse – including being trafficked by her own mother and repeatedly gang raped – resulted in the dissociative disorder that led to her commission of the crime.
Below is a statement from Sandra Babcock, one of Mrs. Montgomery’s attorneys:
“Lisa Montgomery is person with severe mental illness, and numerous experts have concluded that her crime was the product of a psychotic episode. 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. No one intervened to help Lisa, though many knew what was happening to her.
“In the grip of a psychotic break, Lisa killed a pregnant woman and took the baby. This was a terrible crime, but Lisa took full responsibility and offered to plead guilty and accept life imprisonment with no possibility of release. Yet the federal government insisted on seeking the death penalty, and prosecutors brushed off what little her lawyers told the jury about her history as an “abuse excuse.” Now, despite Lisa’s deteriorating mental health and a much deeper understanding of the trauma she endured, the government plans to kill her. No other woman has been executed for a similar crime, because most prosecutors have recognized that it is inevitably the product of trauma and mental illness.
“Executing Lisa Montgomery would be yet another injustice inflicted on a woman who has known a lifetime of mistreatment.”
- Sandra L. Babcock, Clinical Professor of Law, Cornell Law School
- November 23, 2020