Two attorneys for the only woman on federal death row are incapacitated after contracting COVID-19 while traveling to meet with their client.
That’s what attorney Sandra Babcock told U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss on Monday in arguments seeking to delay the execution.
Babcock says the attorneys are unable to complete a clemency application for federal inmate Lisa Montgomery that’s due before midnight.
Montgomery is suing the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. Attorney General William Barr to delay the execution long enough to effectively file a clemency application. Babcock says Barr is to blame for any delays because he scheduled the execution during a pandemic.
"The two lawyers representing Mrs. Montgomery, who have been her longstanding lawyers for the last eight years, are both stricken with COVID-19. They have severe cases of COVID-19, and -- according to a doctor who interviewed them -- neurologic symptoms as well as physical symptoms that make it impossible for them to work at this point. They are, in his words, 'functionally incapacitated'," Babcock said.
"Our position is that a person who is sentenced to death, who has one opportunity to convince the president that her life is worth sparing, is entitled to be represented by her longstanding, experienced lawyers to make that final request," she said.
After hearing arguments from Babcock and the Justice Department, Judge Moss said Montgomery appeared to be at a disadvantage due to the attorneys’ illnesses. He did not indicate how he planned to rule but said he would do so quickly. And he urged the healthy attorney to prepare an application to meet tonight’s 11:59 deadline.
Babcock, a human rights attorney and the director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide, said she was unsure how that would happen in time.
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A jury in Kansas City sentenced Montgomery to death in 2007 for murdering a pregnant woman named Bobbie Jo Stinnett and kidnapping her child after removing it from Stinnett's body.
Montgomery’s attorneys and family say she is seriously mentally ill and suffers from several psychiatric conditions resulting from a childhood of abuse.
Montgomery is one of two inmates scheduled to be executed at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute in December. She is the only woman on federal death row.
So far this year, the Trump administration has paved the way to execute seven inmates — the most federal executions by any administration in half a century.
Montgomery would be the first woman executed by the federal government since 1953.