New execution date set for Lisa Montgomery, convicted of killing Missouri woman

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (WDAF) — A federal judge has set a new execution date for Lisa Montgomery, who was convicted of killing Bobbi Jo Stinnett and kidnapping her baby in Skidmore, Missouri in 2004.

Montgomery is now scheduled to be put to death Jan. 12, 2021.

Last week, a federal judge temporarily blocked Montgomery’s execution because the attorneys representing her contracted coronavirus wile visiting her in prison.

PREVIOUSLY: Federal judge halts Lisa Montgomery’s execution after lawyers contract virus 

She was originally scheduled to be executed Dec. 8 at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.

In December 2004, Montgomery killed pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett at her home in Skidmore. Montgomery then used a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from Stinnett’s womb. She kidnapped the baby and tried to pass the infant off as her own until she was captured the next day in Kansas.

An attorney for Montgomery, Sandra L. Babcock, said in a statement that her client is mentally ill and should not be executed.

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“Lisa Montgomery is person with severe mental illness, and numerous experts have concluded
that her crime was the product of a psychotic episode. It is difficult to grasp the extremity of the
horrors Lisa suffered from her earliest childhood, including being raped by her stepfather,
handed off to his friends for their use, sold to groups of adult men by her own mother and
repeatedly gang raped, and relentlessly beaten and neglected. No one intervened to help Lisa,
though many knew what was happening to her.
 
“In the grip of a psychotic break, Lisa killed a pregnant woman and took the baby. This was a
terrible crime, but Lisa took full responsibility and offered to plead guilty and accept life
imprisonment with no possibility of release. Yet the federal government insisted on seeking the
death penalty, and prosecutors brushed off what little her lawyers told the jury about her history
as an “abuse excuse. Now, despite Lisa’s deteriorating mental health and a much deeper
understanding of the trauma she endured, the government plans to kill her. No other woman has
been executed for a similar crime, because most prosecutors have recognized that it is inevitably
the product of trauma and mental illness.
 
“Executing Lisa Montgomery would be yet another injustice inflicted on a woman who has
known a lifetime of mistreatment.”