The Knucklehead of the Day award

Today's winner is Lisa Montgomery. She gets the award for the following.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. - Rejecting an insanity defense, a jury convicted a woman of killing an expectant mother, cutting the baby from her womb and taking the infant home.

Jurors deliberated for about four hours Monday before finding Lisa Montgomery, 39, guilty of kidnapping resulting in death in the 2004 attack on 23-year-old Bobbie Jo Stinnett. Montgomery's attorneys must now try to persuade the same jurors to spare their client's life.

The jury was to take a break Tuesday and begin hearing evidence Wednesday in the penalty phase of the trial. Prosecutors said they plan to seek the death penalty. Jurors can also recommend life in federal prison without the possibility of parole.

In reaching their verdict, the jury was asked to determine why — not whether — Montgomery attacked Stinnett on Dec. 16, 2004, at Stinnett's home in Skidmore. Jurors could have acquitted her outright or found her not guilty by reason of insanity.

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Prosecutors said Montgomery is not criminally insane and was faking mental illness to help her defense. They said she had a history of pretending to be pregnant to get attention and avoid work.

By the fall of 2004, prosecutors said, Montgomery was facing mounting pressure to have a baby.

Her relatives were telling Kevin Montgomery and his parents that Montgomery was incapable of having children after undergoing a tubal ligation in 1990. And Montgomery's ex-husband, Carl Boman, told her he suspected she was faking the pregnancy and that he planned to use that against her to obtain custody of two of the couple's four children. A custody hearing had been set for January 2005.

As Montgomery's purported Dec. 13, 2004, due date approached, she began conducting Internet searches on Stinnett and researching different aspects of childbirth. The defense portrayed those efforts as evidence that she believed she was pregnant; the prosecution called them proof of premeditation.

Prosecutors said Montgomery used a rope to choke Stinnett, who was eight months pregnant. But Stinnett was conscious and trying to defend herself as Montgomery used a kitchen knife to cut the baby girl from the womb, prosecutors said.

Montgomery was arrested the next day after spending the morning showing off the infant as her own in her hometown of Melvern, Kan.

Montgomery has to be nuts to do what she did, but that doesn't absolve her of murder IMHO. I wasn't around to blog in 2004, so I could give no award then, but I will today. You Lisa Montgomery are today's Knucklehead of the Day.

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