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USA - Two death row inmates reject Biden’s clemency

January 7, 2025:

January 7, 2025 - USA. Two death row inmates reject Biden’s clemency
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis argued that President Joe Biden’s commutations hinder their chance of appeal as they seek to prove their innocence.
Two death row inmates whose sentences were commuted by President Joe Biden last month are rejecting the clemency, arguing that it hinders the chance of their appeal as they seek to prove their innocence.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis were among the 37 federal inmates whose sentences were reclassified on Dec. 23 by Biden from execution to life in prison without parole. Both men have refused to sign the paperwork accepting their commutations and filed emergency motions on Dec. 30 to block them, according to two separate court filings in Indiana’s southern district federal court.
Agofsky argued that accepting the commutation would complicate his ongoing appeal, while Davis objected to the “constitutional conundrum” of the executive branch changing his sentence without his approval.
A president can commute a death sentence without the inmate’s consent, according to a 1927 Supreme Court ruling. The Justice Department’s Office of the Pardon Attorney did not immediately respond to a request for comment during the overnight hours.
Agofsky, 53, and Davis, 60, are both inmates at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana — where the majority of federal death row inmates are housed, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Agofsky was sentenced to death in 2004 after he was convicted of killing a fellow inmate in prison while serving a sentence for the 1989 robbery and murder of a bank manager. Agofsky had been working to establish his innocence in the previous conviction, he wrote in his request for an emergency injunction, arguing that the charges that led to his death sentence had been filed in a “multiplicitous and unconstitutional way.”
Agofsky wrote that reducing his sentence to a life sentence would remove the protection granted to him under the concept of heightened scrutiny — a legal process in which courts are tasked with examining death penalty cases under heightened standards, given the significant consequences of sentencing someone to execution.
Though the heightened standards doctrine does not necessarily lead to convictions being overturned, Agofsky wrote that reducing his sentence and removing the heightened scrutiny of his case “constitutes an undue burden, and leaves the defendant in a position of fundamental unfairness, which would decimate his pending appellate procedures.”
Agofsky “merely wishes for his case to play out in court as it was meant to, within the protection of heightened scrutiny, and without the interference of partisan politics,” he wrote in his filing.
Davis, a former New Orleans police officer accused of heading a drug conspiracy operation, was sentenced to death by lethal injection in 1996 after he was convicted of ordering the murder of a 32-year-old woman who had filed a brutality complaint against him. His death sentence was overturned in 1999, but he was retried and resentenced in 2005.
“Prisoner Davis has always maintained his innocence and argued that the federal court had no jurisdiction to try him for civil rights offenses,” Davis wrote in his request for an emergency injunction.
Davis wrote that having the death penalty attached to his case “would draw attention to the overwhelming misconduct” that he accused the Justice Department of committing.
While it’s unclear whether a commutation would help or hinder an inmate’s appeal, the 1991 commutation of Joseph Giarratano’s death sentence to a life imprisonment in Virginia by Gov. L. Douglas Wilder left open the possibility of a new trial, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. After the attorney general declined to retry the case, Giarratano was eventually granted parole.
Biden’s commutations last month reduced the sentences of almost every inmate on federal death row, keeping in place the death sentences for three federal prisoners, who he said were involved in cases of “terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” He said in a statement that his commutations “will prevent the next Administration from carrying out the execution sentences that would not be handed down under current policy and practice.”
During Donald Trump’s first term, the Justice Department restarted federal executions for the first time in nearly two decades, carrying out 13 lethal injections. The last federal executions were in January 2021 — days before Biden was sworn into office — during which three prisoners were executed within days of each other, the Death Penalty Information Center said.
During Biden’s presidency, the Justice Department halted federal executions, though it has sought new death sentences and is defending existing ones in court.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2025/01/07/death-row-inmate-biden-commutation-life-sentence/