A Case for Mental Illness Mitigating Verdicts and Sentences

At the beginning of this year, I reacted with horror at the federal decision by the United States government to execute Lisa Montgomery more than 16 years after her crime, making her the first woman to be executed federally since 1953.

The initial horror was at former President Trump’s attempt to execute as many as he could before he left office. There was also undeniable horror at Montgomery’s gruesome murder of a young 8-month pregnant woman Bobbie Jo Stinnett, and ultimately for Montgomery to be punished in this way by the state. But most of all, it was the stories of the repeated and depraved sexual abuse she experienced at the hands of those who were meant to protect her.

For this article, I will detail why Lisa Montgomery’s insanity defense fell apart and failed to properly consider her childhood, so powerfully detailed by an older surviving stepsister who managed to get away into a new foster home and the many experts who investigated her childhood for her post-conviction appeal. Her resulting post-crime diagnoses included borderline personality disorder, which was changed to bipolar disorder for the subsequent appeal and diagnosed complex PTSD, as well as a brain impairment. I believe her childhood of endless abuse and trauma was negated by the prosecutors and subsequently discarded by the jury.

In addition, as a contrast to Montgomery’s verdict and sentence, I will share a case of a young Australian woman with a similar family background of deprivation and mental illness who also committed a shocking murder, but whose mental illness mitigated both the verdict and the sentence. In all my discussion, I will withhold the details of the murders to try to eliminate triggers and issue a disclaimer from the outset that most people with mental illness, myself included, are not murderous or even violent to others. Generally, we are more likely to hurt ourselves before harming others.

United States of America vs Lisa M. Montgomery

Montgomery’s insanity defense failed to persuade the jury because of what they included and what they excluded. They chose to prioritize the somatic symptom disorder of pseudocyesis, a rare disorder where someone believes themselves to be pregnant when they are not, and attributed this to her childhood trauma. The defense experts argued that the pseudocyesis led to a delusional and dissociative state where Montgomery believed herself to be pregnant. PET scans of Montgomery’s brain showing abnormalities were argued as evidence of the source of this disorder. The prosecution’s psychiatric expert discredited these brain scans’s causal connection to pseudocyesis and further argued that Montgomery’s acts of falsifying doctor’s letters proved that she knew she wasn’t pregnant and therefore acted contrary to being under that “delusion.” The final dismantling of the defense’s insanity defense was when the state was able to show that in pseudocyesis there is a sincere belief that one is pregnant, not a delusional state. I wonder why her defense team didn’t argue that Montgomery’s symptom of dissociation is part of borderline personality disorder as well as a subtype of PTSD with as outlined by the DSM- 5, but instead inaccurately focused on such an obscure disorder unlikely to be known by the jury.

The probative evidence of the severe, longitudinal sexual abuse Montgomery endured at the hands of her step father and his friends, as well as the sex trafficking by her mother to tradesman she couldn’t afford to pay, was excluded from the trial. At the time Montgomery had falsely claimed that her brother was with her when she committed the murder which was proven false when he produced a verifiable alibi. As a result of this deception none of her family would testify to the abuse she experienced as a child, but in recent years both her stepsister and brother have confirmed what Lisa endured. Certainly the appeals and motions since 2009 have focused in great detail on the severity of the abuse and on how her mental illnesses and brain impairment prevent her from understanding the capital nature of her sentence. These appeals continued right up until her death and had some success with a district court judge granting Montgomery a motion to determine her competency for execution just two days before her death. But the Supreme Court justices overturned this in a 6-3 decision upholding her sentence, and so the death by lethal injection went ahead on the January 13.

In the end the heinous crime Montgomery committed, and unequivocally it was heinous, stood unmitigated by any psychiatric evidence once guilt was proven, leaving no protection against the ultimate punishment by the state. I have not read anyone, including her step sister who petitioned the President to reconsider, who has argued that Lisa Montgomery deserved anything less than life imprisonment, but was she the one who deserved to die for her despicable crime? Surely her now deceased mother and stepfather deserve every bit of the penalty she was served. And what about all of those who participated in her childhood abuse or who knew and turned away? Or what about systemic socio-economic disparities ignored by governments and their individual consequences?

That day, I felt the devastation of a government enacting the god-like role of determining life and death for Lisa, while acknowledge the pain of the family of her murder victim. Surely childhood abuse and mental illness has to count for more in understanding people’s worst actions. Perhaps an alternative answer can be found in the equally wretched life and crime of Jamie Lee Dohleguy in the different justice system of a different country.

Department of Public Prosecutions (state of Victoria) v Dohleguy

At the outset I acknowledge how problematic it is to compare two different justice systems in two different countries, especially when only one has the death penalty. It is certainly not my objective to suggest one is better, especially not the one I live under. I might even argue that while sentencing is generally too harsh in the United States, it is generally too lenient in Australia.

Nevertheless, I would like to contrast the way Lisa Montgomery’s mental illness was treated by the federal justice system of the United States with how Jamie Lee Dohleguy’s severe mental illness and abused background were treated by the justice system of the state of Victoria, Australia.

Certainly the crimes of the two women had similarities as Dohleguy and Montgomery both made arrangements online to meet their victims. Dohleguy met and murdered a slightly built international student named Maulin Rathod through a dating app, and Montgomery met and murdered a dog breeder through the guise of Montgomery buying one of her available pups.

Dohleguy had a similarly wretched family upbringing of neglect, abandonment and sexual violence, but without Montgomery’s heinous level of endured sexual abuse, and the result was different in that Dohleguy ended up in round the clock care on a child protection order while no one rescued Montgomery from her terror. Still, the disturbance of Dohleguy’s mind beginning as a child was severe enough to feature multiple self-harm and suicide attempts often with the goal simply to be put under anesthetic to escape the pain. In her teenage years, Dohleguy was diagnosed with a severe form of a mixed personality disorder (borderline and antisocial) and in the expert opinions of a forensic psychiatrist and psychologist, these severe personality disorders greatly impaired her mental functioning. Her defense lawyer used this evidence of impaired functioning to show that also her moral culpability for the crime was further reduced. This likely convinced the jury to choose manslaughter (in this case basically defined as lack of or complication of intent) rather than murder (with a clear intent) and also impacted the sentencing judge in a way Montgomery’s defence team never did with their evidence of pseudocyesis. For example, the forensic psychiatrist Professor Andrew Carroll argued persuasively from the witness stand about the enduring impact of her deprived childhood:

“[Dohleguy] has an extreme level of impairment in identity consistent with people who have had very neglectful early years… very little sense of agency: e.g when a baby cries, parents come to meet the baby’s needs. If this is thwarted, there is an enduring sense of powerlessness.”

Dohleguy’s trial mostly focused on whether it could be proven that she intended to kill her date (murder), or whether she wanted someone to intervene and stop her bad side from taking over (manslaughter). The defense indeed showed that her mind was so impaired and disordered, because of her severe mental illness, that she actually wanted someone to stop her because she couldn’t stop herself. From the physical evidence and manner of death it seemed clear that she intended to kill, but in police interviews, her internet searches and phone calls with care workers on the day of the offense, it appeared that she wanted to kill and she also didn’t want to kill. She described that her mind was a battleground between a self that “wants to bomb the planet and another that wants to swim with her care workers.”

This battleground between unstable selves was seen throughout the day of her offending. It started when she had run out of her medication, only recently allowed to live on her own without carers, she was defeated by getting it by herself and desperately asked a care worker to get it for her, but when she refused Dohleguy went into a dark rage and contemplation. After that she made contradictory internet searches related to murder, accessed a psychologist’s page which culminated in her messaging her care worker that she had “bad temptations” and was told to call the police to which Dohleguy replied that “they won’t believe me and I don’t want to go to jail either.” A mix of reaching out and then feeling not believed just as her unstable selves swung between help and harm. After she had murdered she told the police; “I killed somebody. I didn’t want to do it but I did it.”

This evidence was successfully used by Dohleguy’s defence lawyer and Professor Carroll who described Dohleguy’s inner conflict and impairment of mind in this way; “She experiences her inner world as a torrent of disordered feelings [which is] difficult to sustain in times of stress [with] reckless behaviour like on the edge of a cliff.. Gory scenes [as] her inner world is war.” He further argued that “where most people would see acute distress as a trigger to stop doing what they are doing it doesn’t work in [Dohleguy’s] circuitory [because of ] a very poor sense of self.”

The jury deliberated for over a week perhaps struggling to reconcile a murderous act with a very impaired and disordered mind. In the end, the jury found her not guilty of murder but guilty of manslaughter. Almost a year later, the judge sentenced her with nine years with a non-parole period of five years and six months. Even in the judge’s sentencing remarks he acknowledged that the prognosis journey to parole would be complex and difficult to predict with instances of self-harm and violent impulses still apparent especially in the first few years of her incarceration but improving more recently.

While the conviction and sentence of Jamie Lee Dohleguy by the court of Victoria, Australia could be seen as too lenient by many and certainly her murderous act received a form of punishment at different ends of the spectrum to Lisa Montgomery’s murderous act, it is notable that a justice system seriously engaged with mental illness as a mitigating factor at both the verdict and the penalty level.

It is my hope that people like Lisa Montgomery can in the future receive more compassion by their justice systems. While these crimes and punishments may be worlds away from the vast majority of us who daily battle with brutal mental illnesses, it would be reassuring and validating to know that our governments, juries of our peers and court appointees of our justice systems could care enough to understand us better while at the same time justice is still done and crimes are still punished.