On Friday, U.S. Attorney John F. Wood of the Western District of Missouri announced that a federal jury, after about four hours of deliberation, returned a special verdict that finds Lisa M. Montgomery, 39, of Melvern, Kansas, should be sentenced to receive death for kidnapping a baby girl in December of 2004. The method of kidnapping was such that it resulted in the death of the infant’s mother.
Her trial having begun on October 1st, Montgomery was found guilty on Monday, October 22nd, of this year, of kidnapping Victoria Jo Stinnett by cutting her from her mother’s womb in order to claim her as her own child. She then transported the baby across the state line from Skidmore, Missouri, to Melvern. The often graphic and horrific evidence presented at the trial demonstrated that Montgomery strangled Bobbie Jo Stinnett, the baby’s mother, with a rope and then used a kitchen knife to cut her infant daughter from Stinnet’s womb. At the time of her death, Bobbie Jo Stinnett was eight months pregnant.
“We are confident that justice has been served in this case. I want to thank everyone in law enforcement who has worked on this investigation. It is hard to imagine a better example of law enforcement cooperation than the efforts that led to the successful rescue of baby Victoria Jo from her mother’s killer. As I have said before, the only positive thing to come out of this tragedy is that today Victoria Jo is a healthy soon-to-be-three-year-old who has been reunited with her family. I would like to thank the jury for their careful and thoughtful deliberations and the sacrifices they have made to ably serve in this trial,” said Wood.
Anti-death penalty advocates claim that the use of the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to would-be violent crime committers and, coupling that with the fact that there can be mistaken verdicts of guilt rendered in cases where an innocent receives the death sentence, as new DNA evidence investigations sometimes reveal, they conclude that the death penalty itself should be outlawed.
Many of the staunchest proponents of doing away with the death penalty are churches and church groups, who say that “an eye for an eye” is the “old law” that no longer applies because Jesus Christ was made the greatest and last sacrifice; and, as he died for the sins of all, even those who commit violent crimes so hideous as to appear to deserve death must have their lives spared no matter what else their criminal punishment is.
The United States Supreme Court, in a 1972 decision, decided the death penalty was unconstitutional in the appealed case of Furman v. Georgia. However, four years later, when deciding on the appealed Gregg v. Georgia decision, the Court upheld the use of the death penalty.
Advocates for the death penalty maintain that it gives a sense of justice to the families of victims killed in violent crimes, and they are not convinced that it does not act as a deterrent.
Source:
http://prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY;=/www/story/10-26-2007/0004691437&EDATE;=
