The disgraceful execution of Lisa Montgomery

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Lisa Montgomery was executed in Indiana last Wednesday morning, becoming the first woman to die under the federal death penalty in nearly seven decades.

Her sentence was carried out after the Supreme Court lifted one stay and declined to grant another last-minute request for a delay from her attorneys. The court’s three liberals, Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, all said they would have granted the request for a stay.

Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, who had argued she is too mentally ill to understand her death sentence, criticized the Trump administration for pushing forward with her execution.

“Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution,” Henry said in a statement. “The current administration knows this. And they killed her anyway. Violating the Constitution, federal law, its own regulations, and longstanding norms along the way.”

Montgomery’s lawyers had raced to federal appeals courts in the District of Columbia, Chicago and St. Louis in attempts to delay the execution because a pause of even a few days could have a significant effect on Montgomery’s fate.

The administration resumed federal executions last year for the first time since 2003 It has since carried out 10 federal executions, the most in a single year in the U.S. in decades.   President Joe Biden, on the other hand, opposes capital punishment  and has pledged to push to eliminate the federal death penalty. 

The executions of two other death-row inmates scheduled for later this week were temporarily delayed, after a federal judge in Washington on Tuesday said they should first be allowed to recover from covid-19 contracted in prison.

Montgomery, 52, was convicted in 2007 of a grotesque crime: strangling a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant, and cutting the baby from her abdomen. The infant survived and was raised by her father.  This horrible crime was preceded by years of abuse and mental illness. Doctors who have examined Montgomery say she has bipolar disorder and brain damage; she has said that God speaks to her through connect-the-dot puzzles, according to court affidavits. Her mother abused her and her stepfather repeatedly raped her, her lawyers say.

But in papers filed with the Supreme Court, Acting Solicitor General Jeffrey B. Wall said Montgomery understands her crime and coming punishment, and that courts should not delay a death penalty that has been pending for years.

The Supreme Court set aside a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that would have delayed a hearing in Montgomery’s case until after the inauguration.  (Ann E. Marinow & Robert Barnes, Washington Post)

My comment: The Guardian in England ran a full article about Montgomery two weeks ago.  The above does not explain the full graphic horror of this woman’s life, from about five years old onwards.  My wife and I read it and were speechless.  Just about everyone she encountered her abused her, it seems.  She was mentally a total mess.

It might possibly be a blessing for Montgomery to finally be at peace.  Her life in a horror show was at an end.  All the same, executing a deranged woman such as this was a cruel and vicious thing to do, unsurprising given who encouraged/ordered it, but two wrongs don’t make a right.  The death penalty is uncivilized, un-Epicurean and a disgrace.  Montgomery should have been helped by a shrink in a mental hospital. Her life should not depend on the views of the President in any case.

 

Inauguration poem

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Amanda Gorman, the nation’s first-ever youth poet laureate read the following poem during the inauguration of President Joe Biden on January 20th.  One cannot replicate Amanda’s excellent presentation, unfortunately. But the words are wonderful.  An amazing talent:

When day comes we ask ourselves,
Where can we find light in this never-ending shade?
The loss we carry, a sea we must wade.
We’ve braved the belly of the beast,
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
And the norms and notions of what just is
Isn’t always justice
And yet the dawn is ours. before we knew it
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished
We the successors of a country and a time
Where a skinny Black girl, descended from slaves
and raised by a single mother can dream of becoming president
only to find herself reciting for one.
And yes we are far from polished, far from pristine
But that doesn’t mean we are
striving to form a union that is perfect
We are striving to forge a union with purpose
To compose a country committed to all cultures, colors, characters and
conditions of man
And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
but what stands before us.
We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
We must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.
Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
That even as we grieved, we grew
That even as we hurt, we hoped
That even as we tired, we tried
That we’ll forever be tied together, victorious,
Not because we will never again know defeat
but because we will never again sow division.
Scripture tells us to envision
that everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree
And no one shall make them afraid.
If we’re to live up to our own time
Then victory won’t lie in the blade,
But in all the bridges we’ve made.
That is the promise to glade
The hill we climb if only we dare
It’s because being American is more than a pride we inherit,
It’s the past we step into and how we repair it.
We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it,
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded
But while democracy can be periodically delayed
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth
in this faith we trust
For while we have our eyes on the future
history has its eyes on us
This is the era of just redemption
We feared at its inception
We did not feel prepared to be the heirs
of such a terrifying hour
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter
To offer hope and laughter to ourselves
So while once we asked,
How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?
Now we assert
How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?
We will not march back to what was, but move to what shall be
A country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold, fierce and free
We will not be turned around or interrupted by intimidation
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and changes our children’s birthright.
So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left with.
Every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the west,
we will rise from the windswept northeast
where our forefathers first realized revolution
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the midwestern states,
we will rise from the sunbaked south,
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover
and every known nook of our nation and
every corner called our country,
our people diverse and beautiful will emerge,
battered and beautiful
When day comes we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid
The new dawn blooms as we free it
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

The attempted coup and the District of Columbia

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The Capitol riot highlighted the need for DC statehood in tragic, terrifying relief. The 700,000 residents of DC watched as racist armed insurrectionists took over city streets, hotels, restaurants, Airbnbs, and peaceful neighborhoods before and after the Capitol attack, powerless to do anything about it.

DC Mayor Muriel Bowser was hamstrung in her attempt to send in critical backup to the Capitol as the attack was unfolding; because DC isn’t a state, she was barred from the normal power to send in National Guard troops afforded to every other state leader. Instead, Bowser had to rely on approval from the White House, which presented a deadly catch-22 that resulted in hours of havoc (and the Pentagon didn’t want to intervene, supposedly because of the “optics” – another creepy story too long for this post).  

DC residents pay taxes but have no say in the federal government that’s disrupted all of city life, and it’s a matter of justice – not politics – that we amend that by making DC a state.    (Hannah Giorgis, Patriotic Millionaires).

My comment:  it becomes increasingly clear that social media, lousy education, insecure employment, and the indecent gap between rich and poor (add other factors as you wish) have bred gangs of (mostly) ignorant young men who are susceptible to lies and wild distortions spread by Nazis and Fascists, a type resurrected after eighty odd years, complete with imaginary plots and hate speech, set on disrupting the ordered lives of the rest of us.  We can expect more of this, and we must not repeat the mistakes of the 1930s.   No appeasement!

Oh, and DC should be a state – it has a higher population than some Western states as it is.

Covid shots

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Getting a Covid vaccination where I live reminds me of feeding chickens.

I arrive at the chicken run with a full bowl of corn.  “Mornin’ all, I call”, to be totally ignored – until they see the tell-tale bowl.  I  dip my hand into the corn, take a full handful of chicken-feed and throw it into the air.

An unseemly scramble ensues, with every chicken racing to get to their dinner  before the others.   There is no politeness in the fowl world, just every chicken for herself, the law of the jungle.

Had I time and inclination I would train the chickens to line up in alphabetical order, or age, or gender.  But I’m just a farmer’s boy, and can’t tell the chickens apart in any case.  So I can piously think that every chicken is being served in the best possible way.  But in reality the more shy ones get thinner every day.

 

Racism and religion

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Studies have shown that attending church frequently does not make white christians less racist. In fact, the data suggests that the opposite is true. The connection between holding more racist views and white christian identity is actually stronger among white evangelicals who attend church frequently than it is among those who attend less frequently.

My comment:  This is about American evangelicals.  My impression is that, outside the US, evangelicals hold to similar teachings but do not subscribe to the racism that leads American evangelicals to vote for candidates that are racists or closet racists, resentful of immigrants and Black people.

For Epicureans everyone, black, yellow,  and brown should be treated with courtesy, as equals, with the same rights as everyone else.  We only have one, fragile , planet. We used to have a fine example of democratic government.   We need to calm down, stop the hate masquerading as christianity  and get our democracy operating again.