The United States Government on Wednesday, executed murderer Lisa Montgomery, the only woman on federal death row, after the last hurdle was cleared by the Supreme Court for staying her execution.

The execution of Montgomery comes after seven decades, as the US government last implemented the death sentence to a female prison inmate in 1953.

The sentence to allow the execution of Montgomery was challenged in several courts, who had initially been scheduled to be killed by lethal injections of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate on Tuesday in the Justice Department’s execution chamber at its prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.

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Fiercely, replying to the court’s final order, Kelley Henry lawyer of Lisa Montgomery called it, “vicious, unlawful, and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power.”

“No one can credibly dispute Mrs. Montgomery’s longstanding debilitating mental disease – diagnosed and treated for the first time by the Bureau of Prisons’ own doctors,” Henry said in a statement.

In 2007, Montgomery was convicted for kidnapping and strangling Bobbie Jo Stinnett, then eight months pregnant in Missouri. She cut Stinnett’s fetus from the womb. The child somehow survived.

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Some of Stinnett’s relatives have traveled to witness Montgomery’s execution, the Justice Department said.

Lawyers representing Montgomery also sought clemency from President Donald Trump, citing that Montgomery committed crimes following her childhood in which she was abused and repeatedly raped by her stepfather and his friends, and so should instead face life in prison.

The execution of Montgomery is one of the three executions that have been scheduled for the final week of Trump’s administration.  Two other executions were scheduled on Thursday, have been delayed as both the inmates are suffering from Covid-19, are waited to recover.

For the last 17 years, federal executions have been paused and from 1963 only three convicts have been executed in the US. The practice resumed in 2020, under the presidency of Donald Trump who had been a vocal supporter of capital punishments.