On Wedneday January 13, 2021 Lisa Montgomery was executed by the federal government. Lisa Montgomery thus now sadly has joined the ranks of Mary Surratt, Ethel Rosenberg and Bonnie Heady as the fourth woman in US history to be executed by the federal government, as well the ranks of numerous women and men executed by the individual states and the USA.
Make no mistake: what Montgomery did to mrs. Stinnett was totally atrocious and cannot be tolerated by civil society, and she was clearly guilty of the crime. But the fact is that Lisa Montgomery was also clearly mentally ill and according to her lawyers did not even seem to understand the punishment she was to undergo.
Executing the mentally retarded people (or as they are now called by SCOTUS: "intellectually disabled" people) — making abstraction from the fact that for me and many other people (including President-elect Biden) that the death penalty in itself is totally unethical and an ineffective and costly way to deter crime — is according to previous SCOTUS precedent a violation of the 8th Amendment (Atkins v. Virginia) and thus unconstitutional. Mentallly ill people seemingly are not afforded that protection.
There seemed to be some last minute hope for Montgomery that an execution would have to be pushed beyond January 20, as Joe Biden is opposed to the death penalty: a federal judge (Patrick Hanlon of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Indiana) granted a last minute stay of her execution on the grounds that her mental competence must first be tested as it could be argued she did not understand the grounds for her execution, which in light of the 8th amendment would have been “cruel and unual punishment”.
But unfortunately SCOTUS, disregarding its own precedents with regards to mentally incompetent people vis-à-vis the death penalty (Atkins v. Virginia, Hall v. Florida), hastily decided in a 6-3 vote to lift the stay, and the Trump administration wasted no time and immediately decided not to wait a second longer. Lisa Montgomery was executed by lethal injection on Wednesday, January 13, 2021, at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. She was pronounced dead at 1:31 a.m. (EST).
Her lawyer released a statement stating that "The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight.” I can only agree with that assesment.
In conclusion: the death penalty is in all cases unethical, inhuman, costly and inffective as a deterrent. But in this case given her mentally condition/illness ever so more.
The State as a polity reserves for itself the right to kill it denies others. In an ethical civilization the state should not have that right either.
