Lisa Montgomery is scheduled to be executed next month.

 Lisa Montgomery is sitting in a federal prison in Texas. Next month, she is scheduled to be taken to Terre Haute and lethally injected. In 2004, she killed a pregnant woman, cut her open, and took the baby. Montgomery kept the baby girl until she was caught and arrested.

The death penalty is a highly controversial and emotional subject. A lot of people go with their gut feeling and base their stance on that. Some folks think all murderers and rapists should be thrown off a cliff. Some people think that only the worst killers should get the needle. A growing number of people think the death penalty should be abolished entirely. For a long time, I thought that the death penalty should be reserved for terrorists and war criminals. My thinking was that such people are too dangerous to be kept alive. Except that most of these people just don't live long enough to answer to a judge and jury. The rare terrorists who do get caught and convicted in the US are put in an administrative maximum prison, or AdMax for short. See, a while back the government decided it needed a level of prison security more maximum than maximum, so they came up with AdMax. AdMax inmates don't go to lunch, play in the yard, or even get to pick up trash along the highway. They spend 23 hours a day sitting in the cell and they get one hour of exercise where they walk around in a concrete pit. As it stands now, there are no AdMax facilities for women, since no women up to this point have created that kind of a security concern. Instead, Lisa Montgomery is on suicide watch in the Federal Medical Center in Fort Worth. She doesn't get to have socks, underwear, or anything that someone might have used to harm themselves in the past. Guards watch her go to the bathroom. Take a moment to appreciate this irony: the government is going to a lot of trouble to keep this woman from killing herself so that she can be killed by a designated government employee. Also, they plan on transporting her more than 800 miles to get this done. As if there is nobody in Texas who knows anything about executions. Only the government can make death this complicated. Lisa Montgomery is a mother of four and suffered from physical and sexual abuse as a child. If you don't feel sorry for her because of what she did, that's understandable. I'm not writing this to save her life. I'm writing this to protect due process. Everyone in jail or prison has a right to a lawyer. If the government starts making exceptions for really bad people or during times of crisis, they'll keep finding reasons to make exceptions. There might come a time where you or someone you love needs a lawyer, and you'll just be told "no". Lisa Montgomery's lawyers have both been infected with COVID-19 as a result of having to fly back and forth to Texas from their offices in Tennessee. Lisa Montgomery's execution should at least be delayed until her lawyers can safely represent her. It is bizarre and macabre that the Trump Administration would make federal executions a priority during a pandemic and his last year in office, but here we are. A lame duck president has nothing to gain or lose politically by commuting a death sentence. This will be the time when we really get to know what kind of man Trump is. https://www.newsweek.com/aclu-files-lawsuit-end-torturous-conditions-lisa-montgomery-1547625