Senators reportedly blocked Armenian genocide resolutions at White House request

Before the March for Life young people gathered for music and worship at Life Fest. / Credit: Joe Bukuras/CNA

Washington D.C., Jan 19, 2024 / 15:15 pm (CNA).
Over 6,000 young Catholics filled Washington’s D.C. Armory Friday morning for the seco… […]

Washington D.C., Jan 12, 2021 / 02:01 pm (CNA).- As three federal executions were scheduled for this week, multiple bills have been introduced in Congress to end use of the federal death penalty.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) introduced Jan. 11 the Federal Death Penalty Prohibition Act of 2021, which would end federal use of the death penalty, bar the imposition of the death penalty for violation of federal law, and mandate that federal inmates on death row be re-sentenced.
 
“Ending the federal death penalty— which is as cruel as it is ineffective in deterring crime—is a racial justice issue and must come to an end,” said Pressley.
 
“The death penalty is deeply flawed and disproportionately imposed on Black and Brown and low-income people in America,” Durbin, a Catholic, said.
 
More than 70 members of Congress sponsored or co-sponsored the legislation. The effort comes after Rep. Adriano Espillat (D-N.Y.), a Dominican-American and Catholic, introduced H.R. 97 Jan. 4, “To abolish the death penalty under Federal law.”
 
The Trump administration has resumed federal use of the death penalty after nearly a two-decade moratorium on its utilization. Former Attorney General William Barr—a Catholic—had announced the resumption of the federal use of the death penalty in 2019.
 
In 2020, 10 federal inmates were executed by the U.S., and three more on death row were scheduled to be executed this week before President-elect Joe Biden is inaugurated Jan. 20.
 
However, a district court judge granted Lisa Montgomery—one of the three federal death row inmates—a stay of execution Jan. 11, “to allow the Court to conduct a hearing” regarding “Ms. Montgomery’s competence to be executed.”
 
According to Montgomery’s attorneys and expert testimonies, she is suffering from mental illnesses and brain impairments.
 
The D.C. Circuit Court also granted Montgomery a stay of execution Jan. 11. The Trump administration has appealed the case to the Supreme Court; Montgomery had originally been scheduled to be executed Jan. 12 at 6 p.m. EST.
 
In December, Pressley led a letter by more than 40 House members to Biden asking him to end use of the death penalty once he takes office.
 
U.S. bishops have been outspoken about ending the death penalty, and have repeatedly implored the Trump administration to stop the federal executions. Leading bishops also asked Biden to declare a moratorium on the federal use of executions and commute federal death sentences to life imprisonment.
 
Bishop Daniel Flores of Brownsville, the next chair of the U.S. bishops’ doctrine committee, said the death penalty was part of the “throwaway culture” in remarks at an online forum Jan. 8.

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Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Jan 8, 2021 / 02:19 pm (CNA).- A woman convicted of murdering a woman and stealing her unborn child should be granted clemency ahead of her scheduled execution on Jan. 12, her lawyer told CNA.

Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death in 2007 for the Dec. 16, 2004 murder of Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a 23-year-old woman who was eight months pregnant. Montgomery, who told Stinnett her name was “Darlene Fischer,” claimed to be pregnant as well, and the two communicated online prior to meeting at Stinnett’s home in Skidmore, Missouri.

Montgomery strangled Stinnett, and then cut her stomach to deliver the child, a girl, via a rudimentary cesarean section. The newborn baby girl was discovered, alive, one day later when Montgomery was arrested in Kansas. Montgomery reportedly told her husband that the baby was hers.

The federal government tried the case in part as it involved a kidnapping over state lines.

“We’ve asked President Trump to commute Mrs. Montgomery’s sentence from death to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole … for several reasons,” Kelley Henry, lead counsel on the case, said to CNA in a phone interview Jan. 6.

“First, she is a person who suffers from serious mental illness as well as brain damage, and a lifetime of physical and sexual torture at the hands of her caregivers, and the men that her mother trafficked her to, for years,” said Henry.

Henry noted that despite the documentation of numerous similar crimes in the United States, Montgomery is the only person to be sentenced to death on either the federal or state levels.

“The prosecution normally understands that people who commit this particular sort of crime are individuals with severe mental illness and trauma history,” Henry explained.

“Mrs. Montgomery’s trauma history is the most severe of any case I’ve ever seen in 30 years of practice.”

Unlike others on death row, Montgomery “has expressed deep and severe remorse from the moment of her arrest,” said Henry.

Henry told CNA that those who wish to see Montgomery’s sentence commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole to visit the website SaveLisa.org, sign the petition, and write “letters and emails” to the president and other leaders. 

“These executions are, after all, carried out in the names of the citizens of the United States, and they should make it be known to the president that they would support mercy in this case,” said Henry, “which would be life in prison without the possibility of parole.”

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