Kelley Henry is a champion for death row inmates Photo courtesy of Kelley Henry Kelley Henry hadn’t been on an airplane for nearly seven months when she learned the Department of Justice had set an execution date for Lisa Montgomery, who was the only woman on the federal government’s death row. It was a Friday in October when the warden of Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas, called and put Montgomery on the phone with Henry and her co-counsel, Amy Harwell. Montgomery was crying and could barely speak. “With Lisa, there was no just talking with her over the phone,” says Henry, the supervisory assistant federal public defender based in Nashville, Tennessee, who had represented Montgomery since 2012. Henry explains that as a child, Montgomery was sex trafficked by her mother and gang-raped by adult men, which exacerbated severe mental health issues that existed on both sides of her family. “We needed to physically observe her,” Henry says.