Why the rush to execute mentally ill Kansas woman whose life Donald Trump could spare?
President Donald Trump’s truest believers have assured me many times that this man loves this country, upholds its values and gave up a lot to take this job. Let’s put evidence to the contrary aside for a minute and say that they’re right.
Let’s say that maybe even when he’s tweeting about election fraud that didn’t happen or ignoring national security concerns or spending his 142nd day in office on the golf course, he’s really only thinking about how he can use his time in this job and on this planet to make life better for those so powerless that they have nothing to offer him in return.
In that case, he’d at least consider proving those of us who don’t see him having a Jimmy Carter post-presidency wrong by granting clemency to Lisa Montgomery, the severely abused, seriously mentally ill Kansas woman whose upcoming federal execution he alone has the power to prevent. But does he even know about her?
On Monday, a court in the District of Columbia will consider whether her federal public defenders should get some extra time to file their petition for clemency because they’re both bedridden with COVID-19.
They came down with the virus four days after traveling to Texas to see Montgomery — a trip they had to take after the administration said it would not delay the execution because of the pandemic.
The chief federal defender then wrote to Attorney General William Barr and asked for an extension because the attorneys are too sick to work, but that, too, was turned down.
In her prison outside Fort Worth, Montgomery is on suicide watch, and when her attorneys arrived, they found that she had for unfathomable security reasons had her underwear taken away. As someone who was repeatedly raped as a child, this was to use a clinical term totally freaking her out, and her mental condition had deteriorated even further as a result, her lawyers said.
Montgomery endured years of physical and sexual abuse
Montgomery’s crime was gruesome: After years of telling her husband and others that she was pregnant when she was not, she murdered a young Missouri woman who was nine months pregnant by cutting her baby daughter out with a kitchen knife and kidnapping her.
But if the phrase “one of these least brothers of mine” means anything, it means someone who has been through just a taste of what Montgomery has. At Montgomery’s 2007 trial, a psychiatrist testified that she had for years “suffered from significant physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.”
When her mother caught him raping Montgomery, the doctor said, it was her daughter she blamed, and saw as “a seducer or homewrecker.” Yet Montgomery “still strived for approval from her mother,” who drank heavily, prostituted her daughter and was herself so violent that she killed the family dog in front of her children to punish them.
The prosecution wrote all of this off as “the abuse excuse” of an evil woman who was only faking mental illness. “As a society, we can’t let people use the fact that they had bad parents or didn’t have a good childhood as an excuse to murder people,” said Matt Whitworth, the lead prosecutor in the case.
But aren’t we willfully ignoring how impaired Montgomery is as an excuse to kill her?
Even in a country where the chronically mentally ill can be executed, and are, none of the other 18 desperately sick women who have been convicted for committing this same brutal crime has been sentenced to death, and with good reason.
Defense team lost time for clemency petition
Montgomery was, though. Then, Trump’s Justice Department revived the federal death penalty during this election year, while the president was running on law and order. And on Oct. 16, with no advance notice to Montgomery’s attorneys, her execution was set for Dec. 8.
The DOJ’s own guidelines say the defense team should have 120 days to prepare a clemency petition, but they gave Montgomery’s attorneys only until Nov. 15.
Because apparently, the government just can’t wait. Why the rush to kill this woman without letting her appeal for clemency be heard? This is Montgomery’s last and now only chance to be spared, and Barr’s DOJ has already said that it won’t even forward her request for clemency to the president without a formal petition.
Killing someone so ill isn’t justice, and letting Montgomery spend the rest of her life in prison instead of putting her to death would pose no risk to public safety.
But throwing out the DOJ’s own rules out in their eagerness to execute Lisa Montgomery isn’t an outcome that even proponents of the death penalty should accept.
If everything Trump’s critics see as his lack of humanity is wrong, he can single-handedly save both Montgomery’s life and our sense of ourselves as a country that would never hurry past due process to take it from her.
