The team of Lara Harvey ’23, Arleigh Parr ’21 and Genna Haddad ’21, along with Sophia Wang and Samantha Chu, who expect to complete master’s degrees in the field of information science this month, started with research that included Zoom conferences with formerly incarcerated women, who they said shared moving accounts of feeling stereotyped, silenced and alone. They planned to help advocate for women on death row and highlight gender discrimination in capital cases, the focus of the center’s Alice Project. The class partnered with the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide early in the semester, building on a First-Year Writing Seminar collaboration last year that supported prisoners facing the death penalty in Tanzania. Montgomery’s story and all of the case’s developments this fall have been shared on social media accounts supported or designed by undergraduate and graduate students in “ Human-Centered Design and Engaged Media,” a class taught by Jon McKenzie, professor of practice of English and director of StudioLab. The song has been played on the news program “Democracy Now!” and re-tweeted by activists Susan Sarandon and Gloria Steinem to their more than 1 million combined followers. She was gratified to learn that Montgomery’s lawyers played the song for their client over the phone. “Hopefully we’re spreading a fuller story.” “A large part of her story is being left out,” Cinibulk said. In addition to working on the petition, Cinibulk tapped her talent as an artist to write and record “ Lisa’s Song.” Through haunting piano chords and vocals accompanied by images of a young Lisa, the song charts Montgomery’s history of abuse from her perspective and asks if after her execution, “Will you think it’s fair … Will you think you’ve won?”Ĭinibulk said she sought to convey Montgomery’s repeated victimization – by parents who should have protected her, systems that should have intervened to rescue her from a dangerous home, lawyers who failed to represent her adequately, and the laws that put her on death row. The commission was responding to a petition drafted by Cornell Law students Veronica Cinibulk, Allison Franz and Gabriela Markolovic, participants in the International Human Rights Clinic led by Babcock and Zohra Ahmed, a clinical teaching fellow at the death penalty center. government to stay Montgomery’s execution until it could review allegations that Montgomery’s confinement in a Texas prison during a pandemic, and the execution planned despite her mental illness, violate international human rights standards. 2, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, part of the Organization of American States, asked the U.S. Montgomery committed that crime while in the grip of a psychotic episode, according to the death penalty center, which says her case has been marred by gender discrimination, ineffective lawyering and other errors. More than 134,000 people have signed a petition supporting a commutation or at minimum a stay of execution for Montgomery, who has accepted responsibility and expressed remorse for her crime: killing pregnant 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett in 2004 to take the baby as her own. The decision bought more time to prepare a clemency appeal – now due before Christmas – that will ask for Montgomery’s sentence to be commuted to life in prison. 8, after her two lead attorneys had contracted COVID-19. 19 won a federal court ruling that delayed Montgomery’s execution date from Dec. “Even those who support the death penalty can see that Lisa is not ‘the worst of the worst,’ but is, as her sister Diane says, ‘the most broken of the broken.’”īabcock on Nov. “She’s not the kind of person that the death penalty was intended for,” said Sandra Babcock, clinical professor of law at Cornell Law School and the founder and faculty director of the Cornell Center on the Death Penalty Worldwide. Sandra Babcock, clinical professor of law.
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