![]() ![]() Convicted in 2007 of a gruesome murder-kidnapping, Montgomery suffers from severe mental illness and trauma, according to her lawyers. Montgomery is the only woman on federal death row and would be the first woman to be executed by the federal government since 1953. The Trump administration fought back, arguing that she had just as much time as all the other “federal death-row inmates who have been scheduled for execution during this year - all of them during the pandemic.”Ī federal judge in Washington said the execution date violated the Justice Department’s own regulations, but the appeals court disagreed. The court order was meant to give Montgomery more time to work on her case because her lawyers caught COVID-19 while visiting her in prison. Tuesday’s execution of Lisa Montgomery was scheduled despite a court-ordered halt that was in effect at the time. ![]() But according to a deposition, the agency went ahead and scheduled multiple executions in a week because that’s what then-Attorney General William P. Noting that conducting multiple executions a day was found to be a factor in a 2014 Oklahoma execution that went awry, BOP leaders were worried about the strain on their staff. The contractors’ scheduling constraints help explain why the Justice Department clustered its executions together, two or three at a time, despite concerns from BOP officials. The White House, the Justice Department and the Bureau of Prisons did not respond to requests for comment. “They cannot show that they will be irreparably harmed,” government lawyers wrote in an emergency court filing on New Year’s Eve. This, according to the Justice Department, would “ inflict irreparable harm on the government.” The prisoners, on the other hand, do not face irreparable harm if they lose their last-ditch legal bids to stop or delay their executions, according to the Trump administration. The contractors would need at least a month’s notice to reschedule, Winter said in another court filing.īased on the contractors’ limited availability, the Justice Department says execution dates “ cannot be rescheduled with relative ease.” As government lawyers have put it in various court filings, rebooking the contractors would amount to “ significant practical burdens,” “ severe operational burdens,” “ complex logistical considerations” and “ significant, unwarranted logistical challenges.” ![]() The contractors “have made themselves available and presumably have made any necessary arrangements for personal and work-related matters based on the executions scheduled in January,” Bureau of Prisons lawyer Rick Winter said in a declaration. ![]() But according to court papers, the contractors have already taken time out of their busy schedules to work this week’s executions. The government has not said who the contractors are or why it hired them. Justice Department lawyers argued in court in the past several weeks that the inconvenience of rescheduling these private contractors would “irreparably harm” the government more than the prisoners would be irreparably harmed by dying. Instead, their legal rationale for why they cannot wait appears to rest in part on the availability of the private contractors whom the government hired to carry out the executions. ![]()
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