A Kansas woman convicted in 2007 of killing a pregnant mother and kidnapping the unborn child after cutting it from her womb will be put to death in December, the first federal execution of a woman in nearly 70 years, according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, is scheduled to die by lethal injection Dec. 8 at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
She has been on death row for 13 years after being found guilty by a federal jury in Kansas City, which recommended her capital sentence.
Executions of women rare
Montgomery’s death will be the ninth federal execution since the Trump administration resumed capital punishments in July after a 17-year pause.
An execution of a woman is rare and accounts for 1% of all executions carried out in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.
Since then, only 16 women have been executed out of 1,526 capital punishment cases, according to The Washington Post, which cited the D.C.-based nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.
About the crime
The victim, 23-year-old pet breeder Bobbie Jo Stinnett, met Montgomery at a dog show in 2004, according to court records cited by the Post.
After the meeting, Montgomery, then 36, began following the woman’s business website, where Stinnett announced in the spring that she had become pregnant.
It was during this time that Montgomery began claiming that she, too, was pregnant despite a sterilization procedure she had undergone more than 10 years earlier, the Post reported.
Credit: TNS
Credit: TNS
From there, Montgomery laid in wait until December, at which time she contacted Stinnett using an alias and expressed interest in buying one of the woman’s puppies.
After Stinnett agreed to meet the next day, Montgomery armed herself with a kitchen knife and a cord then drove from her home in eastern Kansas to Stinnett’s residence in northwestern Missouri.
There, she strangled Stinnett to death with the ligature, cut the child from the woman’s abdomen and fled the scene with the baby, court records state according to the Post.
Baby survived
Montgomery initially lied that the baby was hers before ultimately confessing to the crime.
The baby, Victoria Jo Stinnett, survived the brutal attack and was eventually returned to her father.
Montgomery’s appeal was summarily rejected along with requests to have her court records sealed.
The woman’s public defender argued the death penalty wasn’t the appropriate penalty because Montgomery suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder at the time of the crime.
“Lisa Montgomery has long accepted full responsibility for her crime, and she will never leave prison,” Kelley Henry said Sunday in a statement. “But her severe mental illness and the devastating impacts of her childhood trauma make executing her a profound injustice.”
Last time a woman executed
The last time the federal government executed a woman was in December 1953, when Bonnie Heady was put to death in the gas chamber for the kidnap-slaying of the 6-year-old son of a wealthy car salesman in Kansas City, Missouri.
Earlier that same year, Ethel Rosenberg and her husband, Julius Rosenberg, were executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing Correctional Facility in New York for conspiring to give U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union.
In one of the most infamous female executions, Karla Faye Tucker was put to death by the state of Texas on February 3, 1998, for her role in the killing of two people with a pickaxe during a 1983 burglary. Tucker’s was a state sanctioned execution, while the upcoming execution of Lisa Montgomery will be the first federal execution of a woman since 1953.
While Montgomery is the only woman on federal death row, 52 other women are on state-level death rows, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, the Post reported. Nearly half are in California.
The Justice Department has scheduled another federal execution two days after Montgomery’s — Brandon Bernard, who was convicted in the slaying of two youth ministers in 1999, will be put to death Dec. 10.
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