Sister of Lisa Montgomery who ripped unborn baby from victim begs Trump for pardon: 'She doesn't deserve to die'
Since there are reports of President Donald Trump looking to hand out a bunch of presidential pardons before he leaves office on January 20, an array of convicted criminals have been lining up to avail themselves the opportunity to become free from prison. The latest one is Lisa Montgomery, who murdered a pregnant woman in December 2004 and is set to be the first woman to be executed by the federal government in almost 70 years. According to the Sun, the sister of the convicted murderer has asked Trump to spare the life of her sibling, who is behind bars after she ripped an unborn baby from her victim's womb. She is due to receive the lethal injection in three weeks and her family wants to stop that by all means necessary. They claimed that Montgomery suffered from vast mental health problems -- caused by rape, trafficking and torture -- and which was withheld from the jury at her trial.
Montgomery's sister Diane Mattingly said: "My heart goes out to the family of Bobbie Jo Stinnett and the loss they have felt. But my hope is President Trump will stop Lisa’s execution and commute her sentence to life in prison. My sister does not deserve to die. She is not the worst of the worst for whom the death penalty was intended. She is the most broken of the broken."
The 52-year-old reportedly suffers from bipolar disorder and complex post-traumatic stress disorder. According to scans, she suffered brain damage because of her mother alleged drinking during pregnancy. One neurologist has described her brain as a "city hit by a bomb". Her lawyer Kelley Henry said that her mental health worsened considerably now that she has to live with the “overwhelming pain” of what she did to Bobbie Jo. She said: "Lisa is incredibly remorseful. She was spiraling out of control when it happened. She was tortured from birth and repeatedly gang-raped. That causes your mind to detach from reality. All we can do is present the facts to President Trump and ask him to exercise mercy."
Back in November, we reported that more than a thousand supporters of Montgomery called on Trump to commute her death sentence citing that she is mentally ill, and a victim of trafficking and sexual abuse. In a letter addressed to 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 the 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.”