A FEDERAL judge has delayed the execution of Lisa Montgomery after ruling that the Justice Department had unlawfully set her execution date while disregarding scheduling rules.
Montgomery, 52, is currently imprisoned at the all-female Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas where she remains the only woman on federal death row after she cut a baby from a pregnant victim’s womb.
The delay may now potentially force the Trump administration to schedule the execution of the “womb raider” to occur after President-elect Joe Biden takes office, the Associated Press reported.
The scheduling saga started when Montgomery had previously been scheduled to be put to death on December 8 at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Montgomery’s attorneys contracted COVID-19 and U.S. District Court Judge Randolph delayed the execution until after January 1, 2021, to give them enough time to prepare a clemency application.
The Bureau of Prisons ultimately moved her execution to January 12. However, death-row inmates must be notified at least 20 days before the execution has been scheduled, according to Justice Department guidelines.
Moss has now vacated an order from the director of the Bureau of Prisons that had set the for Jan. 12 execution date, AP reported, because the Bureau of Prisons seemingly did not adhere to the scheduling guidelines.
Since Moss has ordered that the execution cannot be scheduled until at least Jan. 1 for at least 20 days later, the execution would seemingly not be able to take place until after Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
Biden press secretary TJ Ducklo previously told the outlet that the president-elect “opposes the death penalty now and in the future.”
In 2004, Montgomery murdered a 23-year-old dog breeder named Bobbie Jo Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, and cut her baby from her.
Montgomery, who was 36 at the time, had met Stinnett online and pretended to be a pregnant woman named “Darlene Fischer” to bond with her.
She had researched home births and how to perform cesarean sections online before the attack.
“There was blood everywhere. She was laying on the floor,” Stinnett’s mom, Becky Harper, tearfully said at Montgomery’s trial. “It looked like she exploded all over the place.”
Lawyers for Montgomery have previously argued their client “suffered repeated sexual and physical abuse since childhood.”
The Justice Department resumed federal executions this year after a 17-year hiatus and has put more people to death more people than the last 50 years.
Montgomery is set to become the first female executed by the federal government in 67 years. The last woman to be federally executed was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953.
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