Opinion: Execution may be death knell for death penalty

All year long in her cell in Texas, Lisa Montgomery crochets angels and Christmas tree ornaments and elaborate nativity scenes overrun with more angels. On Christmas Eve, her attorneys called her to say that a judge in Washington, D.C., had ruled that a new execution date for her couldn’t even be scheduled until Jan. 1 at the earliest.

Then, she’d have to be given the legally required 20 days notice of that new date, according to the ruling from D.C. District Judge Randolph Moss.

It wasn’t clear how much of this Montgomery really understood: “Her connection with reality is fairly tenuous,” especially under stress, one of her lawyers, Sandra Babcock, said in an interview with The Kansas City Star Editorial Board.

For a minute there, it seemed that the 52-year-old Kansan’s life was likely to be spared.

But on Friday, a three-judge panel for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled the execution can proceed. Barring any successful last-minute appeal, the 52-year-old Montgomery will become, on Jan. 12, the first female federal inmate to be executed in nearly 70 years.

Her attorney asks, “Is Lisa Montgomery the kind of person who should be put to death?”

A brain-damaged, severely mentally ill person, that is, hideously abused throughout her life, trafficked by her own mother. A person the system ignored even after she testified in her mother’s divorce case about being raped on a regular basis by her stepfather and his friends. A person who never received any treatment until after she’d committed a gruesome crime of her own, slicing a child from the womb of a young Missouri woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, with a kitchen knife.

If this government ever did reflect on whether she’s the kind of person we could feel righteous about killing, however, it did so briefly and then answered yes.

Lawyers including Tim Garrison, U.S. attorney for the Western District of Missouri, defended their decision: “Montgomery received ample notice of her execution date and will not suffer irreparable harm from the bare procedural violation she alleges.”

If death isn’t irreparable, we’re not sure what is, but the government lawyers go on to argue that Montgomery “has no equitable interest in enjoying a windfall from defendants’ rescheduling of her execution to a date permitted by this court’s prior injunction.”

The “windfall” in question would involve being allowed to keep breathing.

Opposition to the death penalty has been growing for some time, but even many of those who support it don’t think it was ever meant to be used against someone as impaired as Lisa Montgomery.

Montgomery’s death at our hands would be so unconscionable that it might even be the death knell of the death penalty. It would be totally in keeping with her luckless life if she were one of the last to be put to death in our name.

— The Kansas City Star