Who is Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be executed in the US since 1953

Meet Lisa Montgomery. She murdered an 8-month-old pregnant woman, cut her belly and kidnapped the baby.

Among the executions announced by the United States government, this Saturday is a woman who will be the first to be executed since 1953. It is the convict Lisa Montgomery, who will be executed by lethal injection on December 8, according to the US Department of Justice.

Attorney General William Barr announced the decision to proceed with the execution of Montgomery, 52, in a statement also detailing the December 10 execution date for inmate Brandon Bernard, 40 . Barr said both crimes were “especially heinous murders.”

Montgomery was convicted in 2004 of strangling Bobby Jo Stinnett of Missouri, eight months pregnant, cutting her belly and taking her baby kidnapped.

Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, who has long argued that her client suffered brain damage from beatings she received as a child and that she suffers from psychosis and other mental conditions, defined Barr’s decision as an “injustice.”

“In the grip of her mental illness, Lisa committed a terrible crime, ” Henry, a public defender from Nashville, Tennessee, said in a statement. “However, she immediately expressed deep regret and was willing to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence without the possibility of release.”

“ Lisa Montgomery has long accepted full responsibility for her crime and will never get out of jail. But her severe mental illness and the devastating effects of her childhood trauma make executing her a profound injustice, “wrote the lawyer.

At the time of the crime, in 2004, Montgomery’s husband had said he did not know that the baby his wife brought home was not theirs. “I had no idea,” said Kevin Montgomery.

“I hope (the Stinnett family) receives as much support from their church and community as I do because we are all going to need it,” he added.

The abducted baby, Victoria Jo, who is now 16 years old, was raised by her father.

The last woman executed by federal justice was Bonnie Brown Heady , convicted of kidnapping and murder and executed on December 18, 1953, according to the registry of the Bureau of Prisons. That same year Ethel Rosenberg was executed in the electric chair , sentenced along with her husband for a crime of espionage for the Soviet Union.

Executions at the federal level resumed this year in the United States, after 17 years without such deaths. There have been seven executions so far this year, while since 1960 only four have been executed.

Montgomery’s will be the eighth and Brandon Bernard’s ninth. Bernard was convicted of murdering two religious men on a Texas military reservation in 1999. His execution by lethal injection is scheduled for December 10.

In state prisons, by contrast, 16 women have been executed since a 1976 Supreme Court decision lifted a moratorium on the death penalty across the United States. The most recent was in September 2015, when Kelly Renee Gissendaner received a lethal injection in Georgia for the murder of her husband in 1997.

With information from EuropaPress