(CNN) — The federal government, continuing its string of executions this year, has set the dates for two more, including the first woman in more than six decades.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, is expected to receive lethal injection on December 8, the Justice Department says. She was convicted of the 2004 murder of a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant. The victim, 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett, had been strangled and her fetus cut from the womb.
The last woman executed by the U.S. government was Bonnie Brown Heady, on Dec. 18, 1953, according to US Bureau of Prisons records. Heady and her boyfriend had kidnapped the 6-year-old son of a wealthy Kansas City couple and killed the boy before collecting the ransom.
In June 1953, Ethel Rosenberg was famously executed for espionage, along with her husband, Julius.
Montgomery’s execution will be the Justice Department’s eighth this year, after a 17-year hiatus.
Montgomery — then 36 years old and the mother of four — had met Stinnett in an online chat forum about terriers. The younger woman mentioned her pregnancy, and Montgomery said she, too, was pregnant.
The week before Christmas, she showed up at Stinnett’s house in Skidmore, Missouri, posing as a potential buyer of a dog. An hour later, Stinnett’s mother found her daughter dying on the kitchen floor.
The following day Montgomery was arrested at her home. The baby girl was with her, safe.
The ninth execution will be Brandon Bernard, who was convicted of killing two youth ministers on a military reservation in Texas in 1999. He is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on December 10.
Bernard’s co-defendant, Christopher Vialva, was executed on September 22.
Both Montgomery and Bernard are held at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
Before this year, the federal government had not executed anyone since 2003, and just four people since 1960, Bureau of Prisons records show.
Attorneys for Montgomery and Bernard said executing them would be unjust.
Kelley Henry said Montgomery, her client, is mentally ill, suffered horrible childhood abuse, and had poor representation at trial.
Bernard is a peaceable prisoner who was 18 at the time of the killings and had no violent record, said his attorney Robert C. Owen.
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