Trump says goodbye to the presidency with a record of executions

Lisa Montgomery, whose execution is scheduled for Tuesday, at the Fort Worth Federal Medical Center, in an undated image. Handout.

/ Reuters

The execution order of six death sentences in injury time leaves behind Donald Trump a trail of blood.

The Republican presidency dies killing, with an unprecedented sinister record in a period of power over.

Although it is usually the competence of the States, this week three federal prisoners are scheduled to be executed in Terre Haute (Indiana), if clemency requests and the mobilization of activists and NGOs fail to prevent it, which would raise the number to 13 in less one year.

Of the three cases, there is one shocking: that of Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to be executed this Tuesday by the federal government since 1953;

a case full of edges in which the condemned woman appears as a victim of misfortune.

A lethal injection of pentobarbital at Terre Haute Penitentiary - the only federal prison with a functioning execution room - could end the unfortunate life of Montgomery, 52, who in 2004 murdered an eight-month-old pregnant woman to rip her belly and keep her baby, who survived.

It was a gruesome crime, but at the height of the murderer's tortured life trajectory.

A host of mental illnesses and decades of abjection by his mother and her partners pushed Montgomery to the house of 23-year-old Jo Stinnett that December day, whom he had contacted on the Internet and who wanted to buy a terrier puppy .

Stinnett bled to death.

Montgomery's lawyers and activists and organizations against the death penalty - among them the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, as well as 41 retired and active prosecutors - claim clemency considering that the woman is a mentally ill victim of her past;

the relatives of the murdered young woman applaud the execution, her death too recent to have cooled down.

The review of Montgomery's life chills the blood;

violence was a daily routine in the house he shared with his half-sister, who fared better and was given up for adoption.

Because the physical, psychological and sexual abuse came from the mother, Judy, and her boyfriends.

Judy came to prostitute Lisa in exchange for free repairs from electricians or plumbers, not to mention the systematic rape, followed by beatings and all kinds of torture, such as urinating on her, which she suffered from her mother's second husband before arriving. to adolescence.

When Montgomery arrived in the small town of Skidmore, Missouri from her native Kansas, equipped with a rope to strangle her victim, she was a woman torn to pieces.

According to his lawyers, at the time of the crime he was suffering from a psychotic break that had made him lose contact with reality.

In prison, she has been diagnosed with a long history of disorders that began before she was born, a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, and which was later added to irreversible brain damage as a result of beatings, post-traumatic stress syndrome - as a child, her mother he covered her mouth with duct tape and threw her naked into the snow, "and bipolar and dissociative disorder."

Lisa's life was in tatters when she married a cruel and violent stepbrother, had four children, was once again a victim of abuse and torture, and was sterilized.

By then she was already living in a parallel world, obsessed with children, like the baby torn from her mother's womb whom the police found her cradling, convinced that she had given birth to him.

Added to her psychiatric history is the negligence of the authorities, who despite being informed of the abuses on at least two occasions were unable to protect her.

None of these reasons seems capable of stopping his execution, despite the urgent appeal of his lawyers, this Friday, or a ruling by the Supreme Court that executing "insane" is unconstitutional;

Nor is it convincing the 55% of Americans who consider capital punishment the appropriate punishment for a murderer, with all the lowest support in history.

Perhaps not even the request of actress Scarlett Johansson, among other celebrities, that her death sentence be commuted to life imprisonment.

If Lisa Montgomery is given the lethal injection today, she will be the fourth federal prisoner to be executed since November.

As of last July, no federal inmate had been executed in 17 years, a record set by the pace set by the Donald Trump Administration, responsible for the highest number of executions in a hundred years, and contrary to the appreciable trend in recent years. State.

President-elect Joe Biden has promised to end the use of the death penalty.