Lisa Montgomery: Judge halts execution of only woman on US death row - 0 views
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A US judge has granted a stay of execution to Lisa Montgomery - just hours before the only woman on America's federal death row was due to be given a lethal injection.
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Montgomery's lawyers had argued she was mentally incompetent to be executed, saying she was born brain-damaged.
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Lisa Montgomery strangled a pregnant woman in Missouri before cutting out and kidnapping the baby in 2004. Montgomery, now 52, would have been the first female federal inmate to be put to death in almost 70 years had her execution in Terre Haute, Indiana, gone ahead as scheduled on 12 January.
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Ms Montgomery's motion to stay execution is granted to allow the court to conduct a hearing to determine Ms Montgomery's competence to be executed.
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"Ms. Montgomery's current mental state is so divorced from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government's rationale for her execution.
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"As the court found, Mrs Montgomery 'made a strong showing' of her current incompetence to be executed. "Mrs Montgomery has brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by the lifetime of sexual torture she suffered at the hands of caretakers," the attorney added.
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It is the second time that Montgomery's execution has been postponed. Her execution date was originally set for last December - but a stay was put in place after her attorneys contracted Covid-19
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The last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.Federal executions had been on pause for 17 years before President Donald Trump ordered them to resume earlier last year.There are suggestions that Montgomery now may even escape the death penalty entirely, as President-elect Joe Biden - who is due to take office on 20 January - has said he will seek to end federal executions.