![]() She was a victim of sex trafficking and abuse, with bipolar disorder, temporal lobe epilepsy, complex post-traumatic stress disorder, dissociative disorder, psychosis, and traumatic brain injury - all information that would have mitigated her sentence, had the jury in her 2007 trial heard it. (Both her mother and stepfather have since passed away, without ever acknowledging the extent of their abuse, despite numerous family members’ accounts.) Her legal team found that she was beaten so badly that she had a traumatic brain injury. And when she married her stepbrother at age 18, he continued to rape and abuse her, sometimes with bottles, and sometimes on video. Her mother forced her to “pay the bills” by prostituting her to repairmen that worked on their house. (Despite the ABA’s guidelines, Duchardt did not work with one.) In the course of hundreds of interviews, her new team uncovered decades of abuse, rape, and outright torture.Īccording to her mother’s interviews with her new legal team, Montgomery’s first words were, “Don’t spank me, it hurts.” When Montgomery’s father left and they moved in with her stepfather, he built a separate structure in the back of their home where, for years, he and his friends would rape Mongomery as a young teenager, and urinate on her afterward. In a capital case, the American Bar Association dictates that a defense attorney “must at minimum” work with a “mitigation specialist”: an investigator that digs into the defendant’s background to reveal trauma, mental illness, and anything that can help the jury understand the defendant as a full human. It wasn’t until after her sentencing that a new legal team began to uncover the sheer horror that led to that moment in Montgomery’s life - details that likely would have kept her from ever facing the death penalty. (Duchardt has previously denied that he made any mistakes in the case. The jury deliberated for less than five hours before finding her guilty, and she was sentenced to death. “The jury is just not going to buy it.” And they didn’t. ![]() “You will not convince a jury to find someone not guilty by reason of insanity in a capital case,” says Henry, who has specialized in capital punishment cases for 20 years. He only visited her in jail three times before constructing a thinly-supported argument that she suffered from pseudocyesis, a phantom pregnancy, and attempted to make an insanity plea to the court - a nearly impossible bar to clear, according to Kelley Henry, a public defender who’s worked Montgomery’s case since 2012. Her lawyer was Frederick Duchardt, an attorney who, according to the Federal Capital Habeas Project, has the dubious distinction of being the only trial lawyer to have had multiple clients executed on federal death row. She admitted to her crimes when police found her with the infant the following day, trying to pass it off as her own.īut her initial trial - the one that resulted in her death sentence - did not give the jury a full picture of the life that Montgomery endured before that crime. In 2004, Montgomery, a mother of four, strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a pregnant 24-year-old, cut her baby out of her stomach, and left her to bleed to death. ![]() She was the only woman on death row, and the first woman to be put to death since 1953. In the early hours of Wednesday, January 13th, Lisa Montgomery became the 11th person to be executed in that spree. In just six months, in what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor called an “expedited spree of executions,” the government put to death more than three times as many people as it had in the previous 60 years. Last week, while Donald Trump holed up with his shrinking circle of advisors to plan nearly 150 pardons and commutations, including many for his friends and coconspirators, his Department of Justice concluded a string of 13 federal executions - breaking a 17-year hiatus of the federal death penalty.
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