The closing bloodbath
By 
With the assistance of six Phalangist Supreme Court justices, Donald Trump was able to execute a severely mental ill woman who spent her teenage years being gang-raped by her stepfather and abused and trafficked by her mother:
Lisa Montgomery was executed in Indiana early Wednesday morning, becoming the first woman to die under the federal death penalty in nearly seven decades.
Her sentence was carried out after the Supreme Court late Tuesday lifted one stay and declined to grant another last-minute request for a delay from her attorneys. The court’s three liberals, Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, all said they would have granted the request for a stay.
Montgomery’s attorney, Kelley Henry, who had argued she is too mentally ill to understand her death sentence, criticized the Trump administration for pushing forward with her execution.
“Our Constitution forbids the execution of a person who is unable to rationally understand her execution,” Henry said in a statement. “The current administration knows this. And they killed her anyway. Violating the Constitution, federal law, its own regulations, and longstanding norms along the way.”
[…]
Montgomery, 52, was convicted in 2007 of a grotesque crime: strangling a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant, and cutting the baby from her abdomen. The infant survived and was raised by her father.
Montgomery’s lawyers say her horrible crime was preceded by years of abuse and mental illness. Doctors who have examined Montgomery say she has bipolar disorder and brain damage; she has said that God speaks to her through connect-the-dot puzzles, according to court affidavits. Her mother abused her and her stepfather repeatedly raped her, her lawyers say.
The latest “accomplishment” of the Roberts Court shadow docket has been to render Atkins v. Virginia a dead letter.
The reactionary faction of the Court are sometimes called “formalists,” which is highly misleading. It’s more “hyperformalism for thee, anything goes for me.”
Also, courts all the time: Fact-finding regarding deprivations of constitutional rights is best done in the district courts.
Courts when they want to help the government kill someone: Nah, no fact-finding on whether she even knows why she's being executed https://t.co/0SKLXoKrZn— Kevin Trahan (@k_trahan) January 12, 2021