She is the first woman executed by federal authorities in almost 70 years.

Lisa Montgomery received a lethal injection on Wednesday, January 13, after the green light from the Supreme Court seized by the lawyers of this 52-year-old woman, convicted of having murdered a pregnant woman in order to steal her fetus.

Lisa Montgomery's defenders do not deny the gravity of her crime, but her defenders believe that she suffered from severe mental disorders as a result of violence and gang rape suffered in her childhood.

In 2004, the convict, unable to have a new child, had spotted her victim, a dog breeder, on the Internet and came to her home in Missouri under the pretext of buying her a terrier.

There, she had strangled her, had opened her uterus, had taken the baby, who survived, before abandoning it in a pool of blood.

 Monday evening, a federal judge had ordered to suspend his execution, the time to assess his mental state.

“Lisa Montgomery is so far removed from reality that she cannot rationally understand the administration's motive for her execution,” Judge Patrick Hanlon said.

An appeals court, seized by the Department of Justice, however, overturned the decision on Tuesday, before the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of the execution despite the disagreement of its three progressive magistrates.

A strong supporter of capital punishment, like his most conservative voters, Donald Trump has also ignored a request for clemency sent by the supporters of Lisa Montgomery.

"Crazy race"

Despite the decline in the death penalty in the United States and around the world, his administration resumed in July, after a 17-year hiatus, with federal executions and has since chained them at an unprecedented rate.

Ten Americans have received lethal injections in Terre-Haute since the summer and the Trump administration plans, in addition to Lisa Montgomery, to execute two black men this week: Corey Johnson on Thursday and Dustin Higgs on Friday.

Here again, a fierce legal battle is engaged.

A federal court decided on Tuesday to postpone their execution for several weeks on the grounds that they were contaminated with Covid-19.

Former prison guards have, for their part, asked the justice ministry to postpone these executions "until prison staff are vaccinated" against this virus.

Between the executioners, the guards, the witnesses, the lawyers ... an execution mobilizes dozens of people in an enclosed environment, conducive to the spread of the virus.

For this reason, US states, including the very repressive Texas, have suspended executions for months.

On the contrary, Donald Trump's administration has shown its determination to carry out as many executions as possible, before leaving power. 

"In the last hours of the Trump presidency, there is a mad rush to execute people who have been on death row for years or even decades. It is insane," Democratic Senator Dick Durbin denounced on NPR. , by announcing the introduction of a law to end federal executions.

With Democrats regaining control of the Senate, there is a possibility that it will pass once Joe Biden takes office.

The president-elect, who will be sworn in on January 20, is an opponent of capital punishment and has vowed to work with Congress to ban it at the federal level.

With AFP

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