“He’d wake me up and he just touch me on my body,” Lisa told a judge during her mother’s divorce proceedings in 1985. The summer after eighth grade, the rapes began. Repeated incidents of torture by her mother and stepfather, among other family members, defined Montgomery’s childhood. “This woman had been a prisoner of war as a child,” Jan Vogelsang, a clinical social worker hired by Montgomery’s defense team to evaluate her, told Ms.Īnd it never stopped. She and her younger sister Patty were beaten and held under cold water in the shower by their mother and stepfather. If young Lisa didn’t eat all of the food on her tray, her mother would leave her strapped in her high chair for hours. Her mother and stepfather duct taped her mouth when she would speak out of turn, leaving Montgomery afraid to cry for fear she would suffocate. Violence and neglect tormented Montgomery from the first months and years of her life. Thus far, his administration has fought to have her executed in spite of the decades of abuse and trauma she suffered. Whether Montgomery lives or dies is now in the hands of a select few-including President Trump, as her lawyers appeal to him for a sentence of life in prison without parole, or at the very least, a delay of her execution until after the pandemic. On April 4, 2008, a federal judge told her she’d be put to death.īorn to a family marked by mental illness, kidnappings, brain damage and domestic violence, Montgomery began her life in the womb with generations of trauma behind her, bathed in the alcohol that would contribute to impairment in part of her brain.įrom a curious girl who used books as a safe harbor to a woman whose mental illness overcame her, Montgomery’s trauma compounded into tragedy. Montgomery pretended that the newborn was her own but within days was arrested and charged with kidnapping resulting in death. On December 16, 2004, Montgomery-who has since been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, brain damage, and dissociation, an altered state of consciousness that includes confusion and disengagement from reality-cut Bobbie Jo Stinnett’s baby out of her stomach and left the expectant mother to die. Today, she spends what may be the last days of her life in solitary confinement, shivering in a thin gown in her frigid prison cell-the only woman currently on federal death row. From the time she was a fetus growing in her mother’s womb until the day she was incarcerated for a gruesome crime committed in the throes of mental illness, Montgomery was relentlessly tortured by her mother, stepfather, husbands, strangers and other relatives. Those were the first words of Lisa Montgomery at 18 months old. published the following investigation of Lisa’s life, from a childhood of pain to motherhood behind bars-the story of a woman failed by every layer of our society, including, on the last night of her life, the United States Supreme Court. Lisa was also much more than the horrors inflicted upon her, the sexual violence and abuse she endured at the hands of those who were supposed to love, nurture and protect her.”īefore her death, Ms. Lisa spent the last days of her life inside a prison suicide cell, hallucinating her abusive mother’s voice, suffering nightmares of the sexual torture she had endured, and drifting away “in a house in her mind,” just as she did while trying to survive being raped as a young teenager.īut as her attorney, Kelley Henry, said in a statement Wednesday morning, “Lisa was much more than the tragic crime she committed, a crime for which she felt deep remorse before she lost all touch with reality in the days before her execution. Bryan Woolston /2YaBlBx1fZ- Bryan Woolston, Photojournalist January 13, 2021 Activists in opposition to the #deathpenalty gather to protest the execution of Lisa Montgomery, who is set to be 1st woman put to death by federal gov't in nearly 70 yrs, at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, In, U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |