US Department of Justice announced on Friday that it scheduled December 8th to implement the first federal execution of a female inmate in almost 70 years.
Lisa Montgomery, who was found guilty of fatally strangling a pregnant woman in Missouri, shall be executed by lethal injection at U.S. Penitentiary Terre Haute, Indiana, according to the Justice Department’s statement on Friday.
Montgomery was convicted of killing 23-year-old pregnant Bobbie Jo Stinnett and removing the baby from her body in the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore in December 2004.
When she arrived at home, Montgomery used a rope to strangle Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant, but Stinnett was conscious and trying to defend herself as Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, according to authorities.
The Death Penalty Information Center stated that the last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who was put to death in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953.
Meanwhile, Dec. 10 is scheduled for the execution of Brandon Bernard, 40, a man convicted in the 1999 killing of two youth ministers in Texas.
The two executions shall be the 8th and 9th federal government would carry out in 2020.
After a 17-year hiatus, US restarted federal executions in July, when Daniel Lewis Lee, a white supremacist convicted of murdering a family of three, was executed.
The Bureau of Prisons was switching to a new single-drug protocol for lethal injections, from a three-drug combination it last used in 2003.
US has not abolished the death penalty to date, and the verdict is carried out when it is issued by federal courts as six people have been executed since July.
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