Advocates for an American woman who is due to be executed next week sent a petition on her behalf to President Donald Trump for clemency on Tuesday, arguing that she was gang-raped as a child and suffers from mental disorders.
Lisa Montgomery, sentenced to death for having killed a pregnant woman to steal her fetus, could become the first woman executed by federal justice since 1953.
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The Republican government resumed federal executions in July, after a 17-year hiatus, and has followed them at a steady pace.
Deeming the crime of Ms. Montgomery "
particularly odious
", he set January 12 as the date of his execution, eight days before the departure of Donald Trump from the White House.
In 2004, she wanted to have a child with her new husband but could not, having undergone a tubal ligation a few years earlier.
She then spotted an eight-month pregnant woman on a discussion board and came to her home in Missouri under the pretext of buying her a dog.
Instead, she had strangled her, before cutting her womb, and left her in a bloodbath.
She left with the little girl - who survived - but was arrested the next day.
Without denying the gravity of the facts, his relatives and his lawyers asked the outgoing president to commute his sentence to life imprisonment.
This
would
"
send an important message (...) on the need to come to the aid of victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse
", they wrote in their request.
According to them, "
her life was filled with an inconceivable terror
": she was the teenage victim of gang rapes committed by her stepfather and friends of his, then "
sold
" to other men by her alcoholic mother. and violent.
Married at 18 to her half-brother, she suffered further abuse.
"
She was broken
", "
deeply transformed by these abuses
" without ever receiving help, commented at a press conference her half-sister Diane Mattingly who, too, had been raped before being extracted of the family.
She suffers from serious mental problems, including a dissociation from reality, write her defenders, who believe that this should serve as "
extenuating circumstances
".
President Trump, a staunch supporter of the death penalty, has so far never accepted any request for leniency from a death row inmate.
Two more federal executions are scheduled for next week.