Inside Lisa Montgomery’s Final Day On Death Row — No More Appeals, No More Tomorrows 

Inside Lisa Montgomery’s Final Day On Death Row — No More Appeals, No More Tomorrows 

The first woman to be executed by the federal government in 67 years was put to death shortly after midnight last night. Lisa Montgomery died by lethal injection 13 years after she was sentenced to death for murdering a pregnant woman to steal her baby. >> January 13, 2021, 1:31 a.m. That is the exact minute Lisa Montgomery was pronounced dead.

 It ended a horrific chapter that began with an unthinkable crime. But the final 24 hours of her life were a completely different kind of nightmare. Behind the walls of the federal penitentiary, it was a race against the clock. Her lawyers were fighting a deeply controversial psychological evaluation. Federal judges were issuing midnight rulings, and the Supreme Court was forced to intervene in the middle of the night.

 This is the minute-by-minute breakdown of Lisa Montgomery’s last day on Earth and the chaotic final hours before the execution process begins. But before the courts got involved, before the emergency filings started flying, something happened inside that prison on the morning of January 12th that almost nobody reported.

 And it is the detail that changes how you feel about everything that came after. Attorney Amy Harwell, one of Lisa’s lawyers, arrived at the prison that morning and spent 4 hours with her client, what would turn out to be four of the last hours Lisa Montgomery would ever spend alive. During that visit, Lisa’s spiritual adviser, John Francisco, an Assemblies of God pastor, also arrived.

 What most people don’t know is that John Francisco had known Lisa since she was a little girl. He was the bus driver who used to pick her up and take her to church. And his mother had been her Sunday school teacher decades earlier. He sat with her that morning, gave communion to everyone in the room, and then reached into his wallet and pulled out a small faded photograph.

 He turned it over so Lisa could see the back. Written on it were the words, “Lisa, age seven, second grade. She had given him that photo when she was a child.” and he had kept it in his wallet ever since. When she saw it, she gasped. That is the woman who was scheduled to die before midnight. A 52year-old who gasped at the sight of a photograph of herself as a 7-year-old, held by the man who drove her to church when the rest of her life was already coming apart around her.

 What her legal team had been fighting [music] to prove in the weeks leading up to that morning was that Lisa was not mentally competent to be executed, and the details of her mental state during those final days are deeply unsettling. Her attorneys described her as severely dissociated from reality, more so than they had ever witnessed before.

 She had reportedly begun hearing voices. At one point, she told people that God was speaking to her through connect the dot puzzles. And when prison officials grew concerned she might attempt suicide after her execution date was confirmed, they took away her glasses, which also meant they took away the only activity she had left.

 Because without her glasses, she could no longer read. Every coping mechanism she had was stripped away in those final weeks, one by one, until there was almost nothing left. And yet, the government’s position was that the legal process had been followed and that the execution should proceed on schedule. That tension between what her attorneys were witnessing in that cell and what the official record declared about her fitness to be executed is the fault line that the final 24 hours ran directly along.

 Here is where the day fractures is into something almost impossible to follow in real time because what happened next moved so fast across so many courts that even legal analysts were struggling to keep up. US District Judge James Patrick Hanland based in the Southern District of Indiana granted a stay of execution on the basis of Lisa’s mental competency, ruling that she had made a strong showing of current incompetence and that a proper hearing was required before any execution could take place.

 For a few hours that afternoon, the execution was officially stopped. Legally, formally, on paper, stopped. Her attorneys exhaled and then the government immediately appealed. The 7th Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the stay. And just like that, the window that had briefly opened shut again in the same afternoon.

Her legal team went straight to the Supreme Court with an emergency application. And what the Supreme Court did next is a matter of permanent record that three of its own justices chose to put their dissent on. The Supreme Court ruled 6 to3 to allow the execution to proceed. Justices Brier, Sodtoayor, and Kagan all said on the record that they would have granted the stay and allowed the competency hearing to happen.

 Three sitting justices of the highest court in the United States believed this process was moving too fast, that a woman with documented severe mental illness deserved more scrutiny before the government ended her life and they were outvoted. That descent does not reverse anything, but it sits permanently in the legal record of this night and it tells you something important.

 The people closest to this decision were not unanimous and the ones who wanted to pause were not fringe voices. The moment the Supreme Court ruling came down, the white transport vans outside the media center at Terraote began to move. Those vans carry the witnesses to the execution chamber. 1 hour and 15 minutes later, Liisa Montgomery was dead.

 But between the Supreme Court ruling and that final minute, something happened that her attorneys called one of the crulest details of the entire night. And it is something that gets completely buried beneath the legal narrative. John Francisco, Lisa’s spiritual adviser, the man who had known her since she was 7 years old, had made a plan with her that morning.

 He told her that when the execution started, he would stand in the chamber beside her and sing Jesus loves me and Amazing Grace as the chemicals flowed. That was the arrangement. She knew it and she held on to it. But when attorney Amy Harwell arrived at the execution facility with Francisco and explained that he was Lisa’s designated spiritual adviser who needed to be present in the chamber, a staff member said she would go check and came running back moments later saying it was too late.

 Lisa was already on the gurnie, already strapped in. Francisco was not allowed inside. he never got to sing to her. Harwell [music] described it as a needless indignity and a deprivation of Lisa’s basic humanity that in her final moments they took away the one thing she had been holding on to since morning. When Lisa was brought into the chamber and saw the crowd of journalists and witnesses assembled there, the Associated Press reporter present noted that she looked momentarily bewildered.

Her attorney said that was not confusion about where she was. It was a dissociative episode. Her mind severing its connection to the reality of what was happening in that room. The same thing that had been happening to her with increasing severity for weeks. She was there physically strapped to the gurnie.

 Whether she fully understood what was about to happen to her is the question that three Supreme Court justices had tried to put before a competency hearing and never got the chance to ask. What her attorneys did see in those final moments before the process began was Lisa on the gurnie wiggling her fiver’s fur slightly. A small wave to the people in the room who had spent years fighting for her.

 They locked eyes with her and waited. At 1:31 a.m. on January 13, 2021, Lisa Montgomery was pronounced dead. She was 52 years old. [music] She became the first woman executed by the federal government in 67 years. The last had been Bonnie Hedi in 1953, and she remains the only woman the federal government has executed in the 21st century.

 She was also the 11th person put to death in a six-month federal execution push that had no modern parallel carried out in the final weeks of an outgoing administration. Attorney Kelly Henry issued a statement moments after the execution. She said that everyone who participated in Lisa Montgomery’s execution should feel shame and that what happened that night was the vicious, unlawful, and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power.

 Those are her words, not a judgment. But they are the words of the attorney who sat with Lisa in a prison cell the morning of her death watched her gasp at a childhood photograph and then stood outside [music] an execution chamber while a pastor who had known her since second grade was turned away at the door.

 There are no more appeals after 1:31 a.m. There are no more motions, no more emergency applications, no more phone calls with one more angle to try. The stays that were granted and overturned in the same afternoon, the three dissenting justices. The reissued Bureau of Pryzen’s paperwork because the original execution window had legally expired at midnight while the courts were still arguing.

 They had to issue a new notice to execute her on the same day. The connect the dot puzzles, the glasses taken away, the photograph from second grade, the vans pulling out of the media center, the fingers wiggling on the gurnie, the song that was never sung, all of it compressed into a single calendar day.

 Lisa Montgomery woke up on January 12th, 2021 as the only woman on federal death row in the United States. She did not see January 14th. She never will. and the silence that settled over Terraote at 1:31 in the morning after months of filings and rulings and dissents and emergency orders is the kind of silence that doesn’t carry answers with it.

 It carries only the weight of [music] everything that cannot be undone.