Lisa Montgomery executed

[PegasusReturns]

Lisa Montgomery was executed yesterday - I don’t know how this amounts to justice in 2021. What an appalling tragedy her life and death was.

www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-55642177

I quite agree Pranked.
However get your hard hat ready. You're probably going to need it.

For those who believe that justice has been done, you presumably agree with double punishment then? After all, most inmates on death row spend around 15 years there before being executed, in fact there was one recently who had been on death row for 30 years.

So how does that make the death penalty the sentence when they already have served a lengthy prison term? Either you sentence someone to a prison term, or you sentence them to death. Surely you don’t do both?

FWIW I don’t agree with the death penalty even if the person is of sound mind. For every murderer you kill you create another murderer in the name of the person who carries out the sentence. Two wrongs don’t make a right.

And to the people who say the right thing has been done, could you do it? Could you kill an actual human being? Stand there in front of them and inject them and watch them die? And then go home and tuck your babies into bed? Knowing that just hours earlier you’d killed someone?

And how does someone who claims to be pro life (pro who’s life exactly?) then sign an order for someone’s execution?

@DGRossetti

Ah, the old "IQ as proxy for being wonderful" argument. Much beloved of people with low IQs.

www.thevintagenews.com/2016/09/15/nuremberg-trials-several-nazi-leaders-achieved-genius-level-scores-iq-test-highest-result-143/

1 Hjalmar Schacht 143
2 Arthur Seyss-Inquart 141
3 Hermann Goering 138
4 Karl Doenitz 138
5 Franz von Papen 134
6 Eric Raeder 134
7 Dr. Hans Frank 130
8 Hans Fritsche 130
9 Baldur von Schirach 130
10 Joachim von Ribbentrop 129

Still, if that's the club you are joining - the uniforms were pretty damn stylish.

Thank you for this point. I HATE the looking down noses at people because they are ‘less intelligent’ by societies markers or not as educated. It’s nothing to be ashamed of and we all have different types of intelligence, not just knock smart’.

Back to the top. A tragedy all round. Trump the abuser sicken me and so do the Supreme Court with their so-called ‘Christian values’.

And could you have a relationship with an executioner?

@OllietheOwl

Haven’t RTFT sorry but *@Bluntness100* I’m with you. Whatever happened in someone’s past cannot excuse this crime - the fact that her crime was completely premeditated over several months. The research, the befriending, then lure and murder of her victim. It’s the most heinous crime I think I’ve ever heard of. I’ve read of many people with terrible pasts and who are mentally ill committing acts of violence and murder but these are usually moment of lashing out, extreme violence etc. The fact that this was completely planned over many months makes me think she knew what she was doing.

And she was doing it because... she was extensively psychologically damaged, borne from years of abuse. It was premeditated, yes, but can honestly say that you think she would have done that had it not been for her upbringing which, even for child abuse, was unusually horrific? It's possible, of course. Not all murderers have terrible upbringings. Ted Kaczynski (Unabomber) had a reportedly idylic one and still murdered 3 people. Incidentally, he has never received the death penalty. Which is yet another problem with the death penalty, it's extremely inconsistent. However, this was a severely psychologically unstable woman, with a number of neurological disorders. She may well have been intelligent enough to premeditate it and nothing is ever going to excuse what she did but it but I think it's rather a stretch to say that Lisa Montgomery has EVER been of sound mind.

(In the US) Judges are almost all political appointees; district attorneys and public prosecutors are almost all elected and have to re-run for office to keep their jobs

This is true, and since politicians are (obviously) also voted in, it comes from the expectation that the people will "have a say" in what systems are in place
I totally appreciate the dangers of this, but it also means they get the justice system the majority want to see, for good or bad

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

What she did was absolutely heinous but when I read the account of her life I was aghast. In this country I think she would have ended up in a high security psychiatric facility and got the long overdue mental health treatment she needed. Utterly barbaric to execute her.

What she did was utterly barbaric.

But @TeenyTinyDustinHoffman isn’t it then possible that someone with a truly tragic past can also just be guilty of simply being a murderer? The same way as Ted Kazcynski is? As not all abuse victims end up murderers and not all perfect childhoods end up with nice people.
I’m willing to accept that she was damaged by her past, but like pp have said, so were lots of people sadly and they don’t all turn to murder.

what an awful thread. posted this morning with the victims name. yet pages of excuses about why the killer killed the victim
I don't agree with capital punishment. but it seems the real victim has been forgotten.

For me personally I find her death very sad. I have only ever thought of the death penalty in theory before, but when faced with it happening in real time I find the thought of killing someone as punishment as heinous

However, I think that’s anyone. I do not think any one should be killed by their country. I fundamentally oppose the death penalty.

In this case though, I can see the family, who have never spoken out, would maybe feel justice is served by her death, I think if it was my daughter I’d want the murdered killed..,

I also feel that when there is without a shadow of a doubt of her guilt, I am unsure of the benefit of life long incarceration. That doesn’t mean I agree with the death. More I can see the nuances here

For Lisa Montgomery though. A lot of people are reacting like she did this in a crime of passion, that she didn’t know and wasn’t responsible, that she couldn’t be blamed, that she was failed,,one person even said she maybe did it so she could have someone to love.

This was not the case at all. This was a cold, calculated murder and kidnap planned over many, many months, something that took a lot of pretence and cunning to all she was involved with, from faking her pregnancy to the group, her husband, the courts, the victim, befriending her, discussing her pregnancy, waiting till the last possible moment before the custody hearing, to do it to give the baby the best chance of survival, to teach herself to do a c section and then to carry it out successfully.

No matter how mentally ill that is not the sign of a woman who lacked intelligence and who had severe learning disabilities. That’s a sign of an intellignent women, because what she did took planning and lying for months to all around her and fooling them all. You need to know it’s wrong to fake for an extended period like that. And to lie after the event. And she knew, or she’d not have been lying and faking like that.

She was deemed to have culpability and to be fit for trial, to have know what she was doing at the time and to have known it was very wrong. And I have to say, for me, her actions would indicate this is correct.

We also have to spare a thought for the victim. This was no clean death where she didn’t know what was happening, she came round when Montgomery was performing the c section on her snd tried to protect herself, and Montgomery then finished her, before continuing with the c section and delivering the child.

The way that young woman died is something beyond heinous

@PrankedByLife agreed but the bleeding hearts won't tolerate that.

Bobby Jo Stinnett was the victim. Her baby too. For those that forget.

RIP Bobby Jo Stinnett .

@Samcro

what an awful thread. posted this morning with the victims name. yet pages of excuses about why the killer killed the victim I don't agree with capital punishment. but it seems the real victim has been forgotten.

Samcro this thread is about the execution of the murderer. That’s what’s being discussed and that’s why the killers history is being discussed, because it is relevant to the debate around whether the death penalty was appropriate. People are allowed to discuss this without it meaning the victim has been forgotten. It just means that they are discussing the murderers history on this thread. There will be other threads where the victim is being discussed- if there aren’t then why haven’t you started one to remember her as you clearly think that’s important?

how many times has the victim been named?
just lots of posts about how terrible the killers life was.

Personally I am against the death penalty. The US, though has democratically kept the death penalty in a number of its states. Democracy is majority rule, even if I don’t agree with the outcome, have to respect it.

So given that Lisa Montgomery committed a capital crime in a state with the death penalty, I see no miscarriage of justice. She is not wrongly convicted or innocent. She was assessed as mentally fit to stand trial and deemed able to know right from wrong- so the argument that she was too mentally ill to have known what she was doing and should be in a psychiatric facility is wishful thinking and I would argue partly caused by bias because she’s a female murderer not a man.

She purposely groomed for months and then lured a pregnant women to then brutally kill her and cut her unborn baby out of her womb. This was not an impulse killing. This was premeditated murder. It was t even a case where a beaten and abused woman snaps and kills her violent abusive partner. She killed an innocent woman who had done her no harm. Someone like that is too dangerous to ever release back into the outside world.

So, I’m not really sad that she has been executed. Even though I don’t agree with the death penalty, I can see that this is not a case where it is being misused on an innocent or mentally ill person.

@Samcro

how many times has the victim been named? just lots of posts about how terrible the killers life was.

They're both victims. They've both been murdered

As of 2015, there had been 16 other cases in the U.S. of matricide-baby-theft; none of the perpetrators of these crimes were sentenced to death, making Montgomery’s sentencing an anomaly. Montgomery's lawyer, Kelley Henry, says that’s because the jury in those cases were aware of the contributing factors. “The prosecutors in those cases understand that those women have mental illnesses and a trauma history, and they took that into consideration when they assessed punishment in those cases,” she said.

Montgomery’s abuse throughout her childhood and into her adult years was so bad that the social worker Henry hired to evaluate Montgomery told VICE News it was “as extreme as I’d ever seen, in 40 years of private practice and 32 of death penalty work. I can't think of another case where I've had a client who was so extremely tortured.”

Mattingly says she often protected Montgomery from the brunt of the abuse. But in 1972, when Mattingly was removed from their Kansas home by Child Protective Services, Montgomery was left behind. “I couldn't understand what why I was being taken out of the home and Lisa was being left behind, I didn't understand it. I thought they knew about the rape. I thought they knew about the beatings. I thought they knew about the torture that Judy [her mother] was inflicting.”

Once Montgomery was left alone, the abuse escalated. Montgomery’s stepfather built a room on the back of their isolated trailer where she was repeatedly raped and watched through a cutout window at all times. Years before enduring ongoing sexual abuse from her stepfather, his friends, and the men Montgomery’s mother would bring into the home, Montgomery suffered vicious beatings, would be stripped naked and forced to stand for hours without moving, and have her mouth duct-taped shut if she made noise. Mattingly recalls Montgomery’s first sentence at 18 months as “Don’t spank me, it hurts.”

That is just one account of what happened to her, from a lawyer, social worker and her sister, Dianne Mattingly. Upthread, someone's posted a link to a more detailed account.
While there are people who are abused as a child who go on to be perfectly good, stable people, I would seriously doubt that there are many who endure something like this and come out perfectly fine. Like I've already said on this thread, a much more common outcome for someone in her position would be for her to abuse her own children, as the most consistent parent-child relationship she'd had modelled to her was one based on abuse. Then we'd all feel sorry for her children, until they grew up and did the same thing. They might not but there's a decent chance they would.

Would you say that she deserves to be executed because "she might have done it anyway"? What would an execution achieve that life incarceration wouldn't? Plus, how can this possibly be justice when it's so arbitrary? If Montgomery has faced justice then the 16 other perpetrators of matricide and baby theft mentioned have evaded it.

@Samcro

what an awful thread. posted this morning with the victims name. yet pages of excuses about why the killer killed the victim I don't agree with capital punishment. but it seems the real victim has been forgotten.

They were both victims.

And there were many opportunities for something to have been done about what was happening to Lisa Montgomery. If any of those opportunities had been taken we wouldn't be here discussing it and Bobbie Jo Stinnett would still be alive.

I actually think posting exact details of the killers sexual abuse on here is uncalled for.

As of 2015, there had been 16 other cases in the U.S. of matricide-baby-theft; none of the perpetrators of these crimes were sentenced to death,

So? Without knowing critical details about these cases this is irrelevant. Because the death penalty isn’t in the whole US, it differs by state. So if the crime occurred in a state with no death penalty, can’t compare. In addition, it’s a different crime to take an already born infant after killing the mother when compared to strangling a pregnant woman and then while gutting her like a fish, she wakes back up and you then finish her off before ripping her unborn baby out of her stomach and leaving her to bleed to death. Imagine the pain and suffering. Furthermore, were these also premeditated and carefully plotted murders? Or an impulse, psychotic episode killing? Or even an accidental baby theft- as in a mother driver is shot and killed in a car jacking and the criminal only notices afterwards while driving off that there is a baby in a car seat in there, so they then dump the car seat plus unharmed baby in a park or something to be found later.

And there were many opportunities for something to have been done about what was happening to Lisa Montgomery. If any of those opportunities had been taken we wouldn't be here discussing it and Bobbie Jo Stinnett would still be alive.

Im not convinced. The US foster care system is hardly abuse free. Even if she had been removed from her abusive mother and stepfather, there is no way to know that she would not have gone on to kill.

@379abc

I have no pity for her, so many go through horrifically abusive childhoods and don't murder innocent woman and steal their babies from the womb, especially when they already have children. You all say she was mentally ill, but clearly not mentally ill or incapacitated enough not to put a lot of planning and thought into her crime. I save my sympathy for the family of the woman who died, and her baby. The real victims family can rest now knowing there is zero chance she will ever be released to live a semblance of normality when their relative was so cruelly and brutally snuffed out.

Where do you get the idea that mental illness takes away the capacity to plan? It's utter nonsense.

This is not a case of either/or. I don't think anyone on this thread has anything other than the utmost sympathy for the victims. But does that make the utterly appalling abuse of Lisa Montgomery OK? Does it occur to you that if society had raised one finger to protect her better her victim and her child would still be alive now?

I hate the "no sympathy" response. Rightly or wrongly, it does conjure up pictures of self-righteous people with arms folded and lips pursed refusing to acknowledge that there could be any shades of grey in the factual background to cases like this.

If the jury were unaware of her past I can't help wonder if any of them regretted their judgement.
Was the local authority ever prosecuted for their failure to protect a child? Especially as they took her sister and left her behind.

She was assessed as mentally fit to stand trial and deemed able to know right from wrong - so the argument that she was too mentally ill to have known what she was doing and should be in a psychiatric facility is wishful thinking

Accurately put, Plan, but as so often those with little to no knowledge of the evidence claim to know better

As said I'm no supporter of the death penalty, but it's a shame to see so much focus on "the mental health" of the murderer and so little on the victim - though there's nothing new there either

@Anotherlovelybitofsquirrel

I actually think posting exact details of the killers sexual abuse on here is uncalled for.

I did wonder but if people are going to claim that what she could have went through what she did and turn out fine "because other people have done" then they should at least know what they're commenting on. Whatever she's done, there have been some sickeningly reductive comments about her abuse on here.