Lisa Montgomery: Over 1,000 supporters ask Trump to commute death sentence of mentally ill victim of trafficking
More than a thousand supporters of a federal death-row convict, Lisa Montgomery, called on President Donald Trump on Wednesday, November 11, to commute her death sentence citing that she is mentally ill, and a victim of trafficking and sexual abuse. Montgomery, who is currently incarcerated on death row, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on December 8, 2020, at the United States Penitentiary, Terre Haute. She will be the first federal female inmate to be executed by the US federal government in 67 years, and is one of the 55 women in the US on death row.
Montgomery was sentenced to death after she strangled a 23-year-old pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, in Skidmore, Missouri, cut open her womb, and stole her infant on December 16, 2004. Stinnett succumbed to her injuries. Authorities later discovered Montgomery, 36 at the time, at her home cradling the baby and watching an Amber alert on television issued for the child. She was convicted of murder in 2007.
In a letter addressed to President Trump, current and former prosecutors, anti-violence advocates, anti-trafficking organizations, advocates for abused and neglected children, and mental health advocates, said that executing Mongomery would be unconscionable, citing her troubled past. The letter noted that Montgomery was a woman with severe mental illness who suffered relentless physical, emotional, and sexual abuse including being trafficked by her own mother.
Montgomery suffered sexual abuse as a child when her stepfather repeatedly raped her and allowed his friends to gang-rape her. She was also trafficked by her mother to adult men for sex in her early teens. In an effort to escape the abuse, she married early at that age of 18, however, that marriage also reportedly ended with abuse.
"Lisa’s experiences as a victim of horrific sexual violence, physical abuse, and being trafficked as a child do not excuse her crime," a group of 41 current and former prosecutors wrote in a letter. “But her history provides us with an important explanation that would influence any sentencing recommendation we made as prosecutors.” The prosecutors, in the letter, stressed that Lisa’s history “is not an ‘abuse excuse’ as the jury was told at her trial," and that evidence of a defendant’s childhood trauma is “critically relevant to determining the appropriate punishment for a serious crime.”
Two former prosecutors, who prosecuted similar cases involving attacks on pregnant women, in a separate letter, agreed, writing: "These crimes are inevitably the product of serious mental illness. Women who commit such crimes also are likely to have been victimized themselves. These are important factors that make death sentences inappropriate." The call for clemency by the prosecutors was also supported by hundreds of organizations that advocate for women, children, and people with mental illness.
A group of more than 800 organizations and individuals working to combat violence against women stress that Montgomery was “consistently failed by people and systems that should have helped her,” and that she “became severely mentally ill by the time she committed her crime." The organizations stated: “Lisa developed a dissociative disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of the repeated anal, oral, and vaginal rapes she suffered by the men to whom her mother trafficked her," and although Lisa told people about her abuse, they “failed to investigate or report.”