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Kelley Henry is a champion for death row inmates
Photo courtesy of Kelley Henry
Kelley Henry hadn’t been on an airplane for nearly seven months when she learned the Department of Justice had set an execution date for Lisa Montgomery, who was the only woman on the federal government’s death row.
It was a Friday in October when the warden of Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, called and put Montgomery on the phone with Henry and her co-counsel, Amy Harwell. Montgomery was crying and could barely speak.
“With Lisa, there was no just talking with her over the phone,” says Henry, the supervisory assistant federal public defender based in Nashville, Tennessee, who had represented Montgomery since 2012. Henry explains that as a child, Montgomery was sex trafficked by her mother and gang-raped by adult men, which exacerbated severe mental health issues that existed on both sides of her family. “We needed to physically observe her,” Henry says.
(The Center Square) â Gov. Bill Lee has promised criminal justice reform in Tennessee, and several of his proposed bills that are set to move forward in coming weeks could have a significant effect on those in the stateâs prison system.
âI ve been thinking about it for 20 years,â Lee said recently during a roundtable he held on the subject last week. âNow, we re in spot in Tennessee to really make substantive change.â
Many of the changes proposed in the bills and in Lee s amended budget aim to reduce the prison population while focusing on re-entry for nonviolent offenders.
The Reentry Success Act â
Governor Aug 7, 2020
Cyntoia Brown, championed by celebrities as a symbol of unfair sentencing, was released early Wednesday from the Tennessee Prison for Women, where she had been serving a life sentence for killing a man who had picked her up for sex at 16. Kim Kardashian West, Rihanna, Snoop Dogg and LeBron James had lobbied for Brown’s release, calling her a sex. coronavirus Apr 27, 2020
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is allowing his Stay at Home order issued in March to expire on Thursday and is filing a new one that will allow some businesses to reopen on Friday, May 1 as part of Phase 1 of his Open Texas plan.