Bryan Brooks was a teenager, just like them. In the summer of 1978, he was on break from Putnam City West High School, working with his father at the family’s
When the State places its noose around a white woman’s neck, the world cries foul.
On Jan. 13, Lisa Montgomery, a white woman, was led to the death chamber. The federal government used its weapon of choice, lethal injection, to kill her. She was the first woman executed by the federal government in 68 years.
Widely condemned, her execution was seen as a tragic killing of a victim of horrific sexual and physical abuse. Major publications like
The
New York Times and
Rolling Stone condemned her death sentence. More than 312,000 people signed a petition to stop her execution.
To be sure, Lisa Montgomery’s execution was a tragedy. But the outcry only underscored the public’s silence about the death sentences of Black women.
It s been nearly 70 years since the United States executed a woman.
Bonnie Brown Heady was put to death in a gas chamber on Dec. 18,1953 after pleading guilty to her role in the kidnapping and murder of Bobby Greenlease, the 6-year-old son of a multi-millionaire auto dealer in Kansas City, Missouri.
Her co-conspirator, Carl Hall, who police say shot the child, was also executed.
Sixty-seven years later, the federal government plans to execute another woman.
Lisa Montgomery was convicted of killing pregnant 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in a northwest Missouri town in December 2004. Montgomery strangled Stinnett to death, cut open her abdomen with a kitchen knife and removed the fetus, which survived.