And so it all ended – as many death penalty cases do – in an 11th hour flurry of legal filings that pitted Montgomery’s legal team against lawyers for the Department of Justice, who were urging the execution forward. Ultimately, the US Supreme Court ruled against Montgomery in all three of her final legal challenges, including one that argued that it would be unconstitutional to execute Montgomery because she is not mentally competent.
Since 2008, Montgomery had been held in a federal prison in Texas for female inmates with special needs, where she has been receiving psychiatric care. Since receiving her execution date, she’d been placed on suicide watch in an isolated cell.
