The only woman on federal death row in the US has been executed after the Supreme Court overruled a stay on the sentence by a lower court.
Lisa Montgomery, 52, was put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was pronounced dead at 1:31 am local time.
Montgomery was sentenced to death for strangling an expectant mother and cutting the baby from her womb before passing it off as her own as part of a custody dispute.
She is the first woman to be put to death by the US government since 1953.
Montgomery drove 170 miles from her home in Kansas to the house of heavily pregnant dog breeder Bobbie Jo Stinnett, 23, in Skidmore, Missouri, in December 2004 under the guise of picking up a puppy.
But instead, she strangled her with a rope and used a knife to perform a makeshift caesarean before fleeing with the premature baby girl.
She was caught after trying to pass the child off as her own as part of a plot to win custody of two of her four children.
Her computer records showed she had researched caesareans and ordered a birthing kit.
On Tuesday, a judge in Indiana granted a stay of execution based on evidence that Montgomery couldn't understand the government's rationale for her execution.
Separately, the US Court of Appeals also voted to stay the execution, delaying any new execution date past Donald Trump's White House departure.
However, on Wednesday, the Supreme Court intervened to clear the way for the sentence to be carried out.
