![]() ![]() 8, but in November, a judge issued a stay after her attorneys contracted COVID-19. The government had initially set her execution for Dec. Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan indicated that they would have granted a stay to allow a hearing on Montgomery’s mental state.įinally, Montgomery argued in a fourth case that the Justice Department violated a federal regulation when it scheduled her execution. Montgomery asked the Supreme Court to reinstate the stay, but in another brief midnight order, the court declined to do so. Court of Appeals for the 7th Circuit quickly lifted that stay. The district judge issued a stay of execution on Monday, but the U.S. A district judge in Indiana found that Montgomery was entitled to a hearing on whether her current mental state rendered her incapable of understanding the government’s rationale for executing her. Montgomery’s attorneys argued that she had bipolar disorder, suffered intense hallucinations and continued to experience psychological effects of severe childhood sexual abuse. ![]() No justices noted a dissent from this order.Ī third case involved whether Montgomery was ineligible for the death penalty due to mental illness. The government appealed to the Supreme Court, which reversed the 8th Circuit and lifted the stay in an order issued around midnight. Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit agreed with Montgomery on Tuesday afternoon, ordering a stay just a few hours before Montgomery’s scheduled 6 p.m. The government countered that the provision was merely a way to preserve Montgomery’s right to appeal her conviction and was never intended to operate as an indefinite stay of her execution. In a separate case, Montgomery argued that the 2008 judgment that imposed her death sentence contained a stay provision, and she said that stay was never lifted. ![]() Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan indicated that they would have left the stay in place. In a two-sentence order, the court lifted the D.C. The statute does not apply to a state’s procedural rules on issues like scheduling the execution date, the government told the justices. The government filed an emergency appeal Tuesday morning at the Supreme Court, arguing that the FDPA requires only that the federal government follow a state’s general method of execution. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit granted Montgomery a stay of execution late on Monday night, saying she had raised an important and unsettled issue about the meaning of the FDPA. One case involved the meaning of the Federal Death Penalty Act, which requires that federal death sentences be implemented “in the manner prescribed by the law of the State in which the sentence is imposed.” Montgomery, who was sentenced in Missouri, argued that the Department of Justice failed to comply with a Missouri requirement that prisoners be given at least 90 days’ notice before an execution. She was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m.įour separate cases relating to Montgomery’s execution reached the justices in emergency litigation over the past several days. Soon after the court issued its final late-night order, Montgomery was put to death by lethal injection at the federal execution facility in Terre Haute, Indiana. In two of the orders, the court’s three liberal justices indicated that they dissented and would not have allowed the execution to proceed. In a series of brief, unsigned orders, the Supreme Court reversed a pair of rulings from federal appeals courts that had put Montgomery’s execution on hold, and it denied two other last-minute requests in which Montgomery argued she was entitled to a postponement. Montgomery was convicted in 2008 of strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant, and extracting the premature baby to pass off as her own child. The Supreme Court on Tuesday night cleared the way for the execution of Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be executed by the federal government in 68 years. ![]()
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