Attacks on Catholic statues continue over weekend

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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Harrisburg, Pa., Mar 9, 2018 / 10:30 am (CNA/EWTN News).- The states of Utah and Pennsylvania are considering legislation that would ban abortions solely due to a prenatal Down syndrome diagnosis, in an effort to protect babies with disabilities from d… […]

Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2020. He was the head coach of Auburn University’s football team from 1999 to 2008. / Sen. Tommy Tuberville Facebook page.

Washington, D.C. Newsroom, Aug 1, 2023 / 14:00 pm (CNA).

President Joe Biden this week canceled the planned move of U.S. Space Command headquarters to Alabama, a move that Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville described as “blatant patronage politics” that comes after Tuberville’s monthslong blockade of military promotions over federal abortion policy.

Tuberville has been blocking military promotions in the Senate since March of this year over the Pentagon’s decision to fund travel expenses for abortion after the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade last year.

The Trump administration announced in its final days that Space Command would be moving to Huntsville, Alabama, due to its “large, qualified workforce, quality schools, superior infrastructure capacity, and low initial and recurring costs.”

On Monday, the Pentagon said in an announcement that Biden had “selected Colorado Springs as the permanent location of the U.S. Space Command Headquarters,” scuttling SPACECOM’s planned move to Huntsville.

In its statement on Monday, the Pentagon said Biden had decided to put the headquarters of the agency in Colorado Springs because it “ensures peak readiness in the space domain for our nation during a critical period.”

“It will also enable the command to most effectively plan, execute, and integrate military space power into multi-domain global operations in order to deter aggression and defend national interests,” the Pentagon continued.

Tuberville’s office provided CNA with a statement in which the senator accused the Biden administration of “politiciz[ing]” the military and “putting Space Command headquarters in a location that didn’t even make the top three [candidate cities].”

“The top three choices for Space Command headquarters were all in red states — Alabama, Nebraska, and Texas,” Tuberville said. “Colorado didn’t even come close.”

The senator deemed it “shameful that the administration waited until Congress had gone into recess and already passed next year’s defense budget before announcing this decision.”

Calling the decision a “disastrous mistake,” Tuberville vowed: “This is absolutely not over.”

The Pentagon’s decision also drew a rebuke from Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who said in a statement that the White House’s choice “is very simply the wrong decision for national security.” 

And Huntsville Mayor Tommy Battle said in a statement that the White House had reversed the “meticulous decision-making process” that led to Huntsville’s selection.

“To have that process invalidated and to have our selection taken away is demoralizing,” he said.

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