Lisa Montgomery, sentenced to death for killing a pregnant woman to steal her fetus, could become the first woman to be executed by federal law since 1953.
Lawyers for an American woman to be executed next Tuesday have petitioned President Donald Trump for leniency on her behalf, alleging that she was gang raped as a child and suffers from mental illness.
Lisa Montgomery, sentenced to death for killing a pregnant woman to steal her fetus, could become the first woman to be executed by federal law since 1953.
Without denying the seriousness of the events, his family members and his lawyers asked the outgoing president to commute his sentence to life imprisonment. This “would send an important message … about the need to come to the rescue of victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse,” they based their request.
Lisa Montgomery: Killed a pregnant woman and is the first woman executed in America since 1953
According to them, “her life was full of unimaginable terror”: she was the adolescent victim of gang rape committed by her stepfather and his friends, then “sold” to other men by her alcoholic and abusive mother. Married to her half-brother at the age of 18, she is said to have been further abused.
The Republican government resumed federal executions last July, after a 17-year hiatus, and has been following them steadily ever since.
Given that Montgomery’s crime was “particularly heinous,” the court set the date of his execution on January 12, eight days before Trump was forced to leave the White House to turn it over to Democrat Joe Biden.
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In 2004, Montgomery wanted to have a child with her new husband, but couldn’t, as she had tied her tubes a few years earlier.
He then met an eight-month-old pregnant woman in a chat room and went to her home in Missouri on the pretense of buying her a dog. Instead, he strangled her before cutting her uterus and leaving her engulfed in a massacre.
He then managed to run away with the girl, who survived, but was arrested the next day anyway