The only woman on US federal death row has been executed following a Supreme Court decision.
Lisa Montgomery was sentenced to death after being convicted for the 2004 murder of a mother and the kidnapping of her baby.
On Tuesday (12 January), a judge had ordered a delay on the execution while a mental health assessment could be carried out, however, the US Supreme Court overturned the decision and the 52-year-old was executed by lethal injection at 1.30am on Wednesday (13 January) at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute in Indiana.
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Following her death, Montgomery's attorney, Kelley Henry hit out at the court for its actions.
She said: "The craven bloodlust of a failed administration was on full display tonight.
"Everyone who participated in the execution of Lisa Montgomery should feel shame. The government stopped at nothing in its zeal to kill this damaged and delusional woman.
"Lisa Montgomery's execution was far from justice."
Montgomery, from Missouri, was convicted of killing Bobbie Jo Stinnett in 2007.
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She strangled Ms Stinnett and cut out her eight-month-old foetus, pretending it was her child before she was arrested.
She was due to be executed on 8 December 2020, but a judge ruled for a delay after her attorneys were diagnosed with Covid-19.
Montgmery recently asked Donald Trump for a pardon and to have her sentence commuted to life imprisonment.
According to reports, Montgomery had a history of phantom pregnancies and had also undergone an operation that prevented her from becoming pregnant.
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Her lawyer claimed she also suffered severe beatings as a child, which caused her some brain damage.
In a clemency petition to the president earlier this month, Montgomery's lawyer cited her severe mental health issues as reasons for her life to be spared and her sentence be commuted.
It read: "Broken before she was born, Lisa Montgomery's life was filled with torture, terror, failure, and betrayal.
"Had just one person intervened, all of this could have been avoided. But they did not. And so now you are faced with the awesome responsibility of deciding whether Lisa Montgomery lives or dies."
According to reports, mental health experts who examined her in the past said they believed Montgomery began to dissociate with reality when she was a child in order to survive the sexual violence she suffered.
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Speaking at the time, Katherine Porterfield, a clinical psychologist at the Bellevue/New York University Program for Survivors of Torture, told Huff Post this is common among children who have gone through trauma.
She said: "Lisa Montgomery developed into a person who had profound disconnection from her body, from her mind, from her experience.
"Those were disconnections that were tragic in their consequences. But they were what we come to understand as neuro-physiological adaptations to survive being constantly under assault."
A petition was also set up, pleading with Trump to stop her execution.
Topics: Death Row, US News, crime