2024-04-16 00:47:14
Text: Darcy Borrero
Although the death penalty seemed like a matter from another century, American Lisa Montgomery was going to receive a lethal injection in her country on December 8, 2020, 16 years after she strangled a pregnant woman in Missouri and opened her belly. to extract the baby and kidnap it.
On December 8, Lisa was not executed. Instead, Brandon Bernard and Alfred Bourgeois were executed on December 10 and 11, respectively. The first was convicted in 1999 of the kidnapping and murder—at the age of 18—of two clergymen, Todd and Stacie Bagley. The latter received his sentence for torturing and beating to death his 2-year-old daughter.
However, Lisa, the 52-year-old woman, has now been assigned a new date of death: January 12, in the midst of the presidential transition from Republican Donald Trump to Democrat Joe Biden. Both this conviction and that of other prisoners have sparked the debate on the death penalty.
While Lisa’s lawyers allege that she suffers brain damage from beatings when she was a child, a group of ten human rights experts from the United Nations (UN) ask for ‘clemency’ from the United States authorities.
They argue that the defendant ‘did not receive sufficient legal assistance’ during her trial. Beyond this and despite the seriousness of her crime and those of the others sentenced to death in this period, Americans seem to be less and less inclined towards institutional violent outcomes.
A May 2006 Gallup poll cited by the Death Penalty Information Center, examining public opinion on the death penalty, found that when poll participants were given capital punishment as options or life imprisonment without parole, only 47% of participants chose the former.
This is—according to the same source—the lowest percentage in two decades. 48% were in favor of life imprisonment without parole for those convicted of murder. Likewise, the survey revealed that total support for the death penalty remains less than 65%, much lower than in 1994, when 80% of the population supported capital punishment.
At that time, in the ’90s, Joe Biden was a senator and supported the death penalty. Although he has changed his position, under the 1994 crime law that he co-authored, people have been sentenced across the spectrum of about 60 federal capital crimes.
The international press is emphatic that some of those currently sentenced to death respond to sentences established in the provisions promoted by the president-elect, who now assumes, together with his running mate Kamala Harris, the promise of eliminating the federal capital punishment. Hence, the scheduling of several executions between December and January by the outgoing government is read as a political decision to set republican agendas.
It was during the presidency of another Republican, George Bush, that three federal executions were carried out, the only ones between 1988-2016, since the Supreme Court reinstated the federal death penalty in 1988.
The Death Penalty Information Center states that in the northern nation one would have to go back to 1896 to find similar figures of 10 or more executions.
Federal executions during a political transition occur for the first time in more than a century, just as the number of a dozen inmates executed in 2020 is considered unprecedented in modern history. On the other hand, the case of Lisa Montgomery is at the center of the debates, also because she is the first woman to face a federal execution in the United States since 1953, the date on which the life of Bonnie Heady was ended in a gas chamber in Missouri.