Stay granted to Lisa Montgomery, first female inmate on death row in US

Days afterLisa Montgomery,only woman on death row in the US, was scheduled to be executed before President-elect Joe Biden's inauguration ceremony, ajudge has granted a stay of execution to her.

The 52-year-old inmate was set to become the first female inmate to be put on a death row in the last 70 years.Montgomery was to receive a lethal injection on Tuesdayat a federal penitentiary in Terre-Haute, Indiana.

However, after repeated pleads of her lawyers,Judge James Hanlon of the Southern District of Indiana granted her aneleventh-hour stay of execution late on Monday. The decision was taken consideringMontgomery's deteriorating mental health condition.

"The record before the Court contains ample evidence that Ms. Montgomery's current mental state is so divorced from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government's rationale for her execution," JudgeHanlon ruled.

"Both the (government) and the victims of crime have an important interest in the timely enforcement of a sentence," he said, adding, "it is also in the public interest to ensure that the government does not execute a prisoner who due to her mental condition 'cannot appreciate the meaning of a community's judgment."

Montgomery was convicted of murdering Bobbie Jo Stinnett, an eight-months pregnant woman, in 2004 by strangling and then cutting out and kidnapping the baby. The inmate, who could not birth a child, aimed her shot at the 23-year-old victim through an online portal and under the guise of buying a dog, she visitedStinnett's house where she then strangled her and cut the baby out of her womb.

Herlegal team have argued that her mental condition was not stable and had urged the outgoing President Donald Trump to commute her death sentence. "Given the severity of Mrs Montgomery’s mental illness, the sexual and physical torture she endured throughout her life, and the connection between her trauma and the facts of her crime, we appeal to President Trump to grant her mercy and commute her sentence to life imprisonment," Sandra Babcock, one of her lawyers, said in an earlier statement.

However, Trump had failed to comment or act on the repeated pleads by her legal team. She was to be the first women to be executed by the US governmentsince 1953.