Lawyers for Lisa Montgomery are seeking to delay her scheduled execution because they have contracted COVID-19. Her lawyers, Amy Harwell and Kelley Henry, filed a lawsuit saying they are too sick to provide adequate legal counsel to their client.
"As a person with a profound mental illness, Mrs. Montgomery requires the assistance and advice of counsel," the court filing said. "And as a person with a history of extreme trauma induced by overwhelming sexual violence, she requires careful and compassionate legal representation by the lawyers who have spent many years earning her trust."
Harwell and Henry both tested positive for the coronavirus earlier in the month after traveling to Texas to work on Montgomery's clemency application.
"Each round trip involved two plane flights, transit through two airports, hotel stays, and interaction with dozens of people including airline attendants, car rental employees, passengers, and prison guards," they wrote in their lawsuit.
The two lawyers want to delay Montgomery's execution, which is scheduled for December 8, because they are too sick to keep working.
"They both have debilitating fatigue that prevents them from working on Mrs. Montgomery's clemency application," the lawsuit said. "They have a range of other symptoms as well, including headaches, chills, sweats, gastrointestinal distress, inability to focus, and impaired thinking and judgment."
They blasted Attorney General Bill Barr for scheduling their client's execution during the coronavirus pandemic. They also said that the government did not provide them notice that her execution date had been set.
"They are sick because Defendant Barr recklessly scheduled Mrs. Montgomery's execution in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic," they wrote.
Montgomery was convicted of cutting an unborn baby out of the womb of an eight-month pregnant woman she had just strangled to death in 2007. Montgomery then took the child and tried to pass it off as her own.
Montgomery is the first woman to face the federal death penalty since Bonnie Heady, who was executed in 1953.
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