After a nearly twenty-year hiatus of federal executions, the Trump administration announced that it is reinstating the practice. Five inmates are scheduled to die before Trump leaves office.
Every story of those about to be executed by the government is tragic and appalling in myriad and complex ways. They have in common that they are stories of failure—but not just the personal failure of those who commit horribly violent crimes, but of our failure, society’s failure, to nurture those who needed guidance, to stop cycles of violence before they escalate into ever greater brutality, to treat the mentally ill, to provide the poor with competent and robust legal counsel, and to leaven the thirst for vengeance with compassion, reflection and justice.
These failures are readily apparent in the case of Lisa Montgomery, the only woman among those the Trump administration has slated for judicial death. Barring a last-minute reprieve, Montgomery will be the first female killed by the federal government in 70 years. Like the others condemned to death, she is a victim of the reactionary politics of bloodlust, of the rhetoric of “law and order,” and “tough on crime,” and, especially in the case of Trump, of a pathetically weak, little man pretending to be strong. Montgomery is one of 53 women on death row.
Montgomery’s crime was certainly heinous. She had befriended a young pregnant woman, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, after the two met at a dog show. After arranging a meeting—ostensibly to purchase a rat terrier puppy—Montgomery killed Stinnett, then gutted her open to kidnap her then eight-month old fetus. Montgomery cleaned the baby—remarkably, the child survived—then brought her home to her husband. She pretended it was her own baby; it is possible she did not understand that the baby was not hers.
What could make a person commit such a gruesome, unspeakably abhorrent act? Rational minds can only begin to fathom such insane actions. But learning just some of the details of Lisa Montgomery’s biography helps explain how madness enveloped her.
Lisa Montgomery had little if any chance in life. She was born in 1968, the child of two troubled alcoholics. She had brain damage, likely caused by exposure to alcohol when she was a developing fetus. Mental illness ran in her family. Her father had a daughter from a previous marriage; the two girls grew up together. As part of an excellent story on the Montgomery case, the Huffpost tracked down the older sibling, Diane Mattingly, who described the traumatic world in which young Lisa grew up. It was a world of unimaginable cruelty and horror.
Her mother, Judy Shaughnessy, beat her daughters with belts, cords, or hangers. On one occasion, to punish her children Lisa’s mother killed the family dog in front of them, smashing its head in with a shovel. Her father was often away from home for long periods time. Her mother would bring home other men; fights would erupt, and the violence spilled over to include the young girls. When Mattingly was about 8, one of the men whom her mother brought home began raping her, as Montgomery, then only 4, lie in bed beside her. Mattingly escaped when child protective services removed her from the home.
Lisa was not so fortunate. Her mother married another violent, erratic man, Jack Kleiner, who beat his wife and the children regularly; he would often make the daughters strip naked before whipping them. The sexual component of that punishment morphed into ever greater abuse as Kleiner began molesting then raping young Lisa. The abuse lasted for years. The parents also allowed men who did work on their house—a plumber and an electrician— to rape Lisa as payment for their services. Lisa was thus a victim of child sex trafficking.
Shaughnessy and Kleiner divorced when Montgomery was 15. During those proceedings Shaughnessy told the court her husband raped Montgomery, saying once that she walked in on him while “he was in her. He was pumping her.” The court admonished her for not reporting the crime to authorities, but then itself failed to report the abuse. Kleiner was never charged. Lisa also told authorities of her abuse—she confided to a cousin who was a law enforcement officer—but the officer failed to report Lisa’s situation. At school, Lisa’s work was substandard, and she was placed with special needs students. She often came to class dirty and unkempt. School authorities suspected abuse, but they too failed to investigate or to report their suspicions to the police.
Like many victims of violent sexual assault, Montgomery blamed herself for her predicament. She also began to disassociate herself from what was happening to her. Her stepbrother told the court that “Lisa told me that when these men raped her, she would go away in her mind and try not to be present.” Clearly Lisa had only a fragile grip on reality because she needed to escape reality to survive. That break from lived reality would plague her later life.
As with many children who experience chaotic, unstable childhoods, her adult life mimicked those conditions. When she was 18, at her mother’s instigation, she married her stepbrother who later coerced her into sterilization. She drank heavily, could not hold a job, had multiple car accidents, and neglected her own children. She lived in extreme poverty and was constantly moving from home to home; by the time she was 34 she had moved sixty-one times. She was said to often space out, to be disconnected from reality. After she was sterilized, she repeatedly told people that she was pregnant.
Montgomery’s defense attorneys never were able to convey to the jury the extent of the abuse Montgomery suffered. They may have had only a poor understanding of it themselves. In one of the jailhouse interviews that her attorneys conducted, Montgomery lay on the prison floor, curled into the fetal position. She was clearly unable to contribute to her defense. Prosecutors—who are supposed to seek justice, mind you, not mere maximum punishments—ridiculed what details of Lisa’s traumatic childhood did make it into the courtroom as the “abuse excuse.” They also played upon gendered female stereotypes by attacking her homemaking skills, telling the jury that “[s]he didn’t cook, and [s]he didn’t clean.” They emphasized that she lived in a “filthy home.”
When lucid, Montgomery accepts responsibility for her crime and expresses profound remorse for her actions. But she is not often lucid. She takes a complex assortment of antipsychotic medications, and her grip on reality is tenuous. As with all inmates, the very conditions of prison itself—the crowdedness, the harsh conditions, the inadequacy of even basic services—are stressful, often debilitating. For Lisa Montgomery, they are particularly worrisome: as a death row inmate, she will be transferred to an all-male prison—this for a woman who breaks out in hives if even in the presence of a man.
Clearly justice is not served by state sanctioned killing of its citizens. Montgomery’s case is a vivid example of so much that is wrong with the criminal “justice” system in America, and the death penalty in particular.
Though an extreme case, the fact that Montgomery is mentally ill is typical of those incarcerated. As many as one in three American prisoners are mentally ill. Other experts put the numbers even higher. Alisa Roth, author of the important book Insane: America’s Criminal Treatment of Mental Illness, estimates that half of U.S. prisoners suffer from a mental illness, in large part because of the dearth of other treatment options means they are likely to end up incarcerated.
Once such people are in the system, authorities should consider their conditions as part of court proceedings. The defense and the judge were clearly inadequate to their essential tasks. How could a jury give a reasoned and merciful judgement upon Lisa Montgomery without learning her full history of horrifying abuse? And as is so often the case, the prosecutors sought maximum punishment, abrogating their duty to consider ameliorating factors as well as how the social good might be served by their actions. This is a quite common problem. Once charged, defendants—even judges!—have little ability to resist powerful prosecutors seeking maximum punishments, one of the key factors driving mass incarceration.
Justice must be thought of in terms of the social good. Does society benefit from the government executing Lisa Montgomery? Her judicial killing will not bring her victim, Bobbie Jo Stinnett, back to life. It will not deter other criminals or potential criminals. It won’t ameliorate the social injustices inherent to the legal system: the death penalty is deeply biased against poor people like Lisa and is deeply racist in its applications. It will further harm America’s reputation in the world; executing people with mental illnesses is not just cruel and unjust, but against international law.
The United States is the only modern Western democracy to inflict capital punishment upon its citizens. If Lisa Montgomery is executed—and activists are trying to stop the injustice—it won’t make our society safer. It will make it a bit more cruel, a bit more unjust, a bit more callous. Society—her family, her schools, the police, social workers, the judicial system, and the prison system—all failed her. Donald Trump is determined to add one last, inalterably final injustice to the litany of abuses wrought against her.
Lisa Montgomery is now a grandmother of 12 who spends her time knitting. It is unclear if she fully understands her legal situation and that her time on earth is likely to end on January 12. Instead of killing her, society could place her in a secure institution that could adequately care for her. Then maybe, just maybe, she could wring a bit of meaning and decency out of a life of torture, and we, collectively, could do at least one thing to help this sad, troubled woman.