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USA - A third man, Iouri Mikhel, rejects Biden's pardon

January 18, 2025:

January 18, 2025 - USA. A third man, Iouri Mikhel, rejects Biden's pardon
After Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, Iouri Mikhel has also initiated legal action to reject Biden's commutation. He too, like the other 2, believes that the “condemned to death” status provides him with greater security in his attempt to have the guilty verdict overturned.
Within days of the announcement, two men had sent handwritten emergency petitions to a federal court in Indiana seeking to block the commutation of their death sentences. Neither of them had applied for clemency and both were adamant that they did not want it, arguing that it threatened to derail their efforts to prove their innocence in court. One of them decried Biden’s commutations as a “publicity stunt.” This week a third man, Iouri Mikhel, similarly objected to Biden’s reprieve.
While people on death row are automatically entitled to legal representation, those serving life without parole are not.
The challenges are a long shot to say the least. “The Court harbors serious doubt that it has any power to block a commutation,” a federal judge wrote in response to the first two filings. But the lawsuits also lay bare a sobering reality for most people who go from facing a death sentence to a life sentence with no chance of release. While people on death row are automatically entitled to legal representation, those serving life without parole are not. And for those who harbor even the faintest hope of overturning their convictions, a commutation can foreclose on legal avenues that once made it possible. This is true even for those who do not claim to be innocent but have challenged their convictions on other grounds, from ineffective advocacy by trial lawyers to racial bias to official misconduct.
Trump could theoretically restart executions sooner if the men fighting their commutations somehow prevail. Winning their lawsuits might allow their post-conviction appeals to continue in the short term — but if their challenges eventually fail, it would set them up for execution.
Shannon Agofsky, who filed his challenge late last year, says that’s a risk he is willing to take. “The fact that I do not want commutation may lead you to believe that I am mentally disturbed, suicidal, or somehow wishful of death,” he wrote in an email sent via his wife, Laura Agofsky, in late December. “That is not the case. I am in full possession of my faculties, and am not eager to die at all; in fact, I have much to live for.”
Agofsky found out about the commutations the same way as his neighbors: through media reports shortly after 5 a.m. on December 23. He immediately called Laura, who lives in Germany and was shopping for Christmas. She cried when she heard the news. “I sort of had a mental breakdown in the grocery store,” she told me in a phone call. Both of them assumed that he would lose his lawyers and that his legal challenges were now null and void. (His lawyers have since reassured him that they will continue to represent him.)
Agofsky was sent to death row after killing a man at USP Beaumont, a maximum security penitentiary known as one of the bloodiest prisons in the federal system. He swore it was an act of self-defense — and a key eyewitness later gave a sworn declaration saying he was coerced into pinning the blame on Agofsky. Nonetheless, in 2004, a federal jury found Agofsky guilty and sentenced him to death based on the fact that he had previously been convicted of a different murder.
But Agofsky is adamant that he is innocent of the first crime. He had been sent to Beaumont after being convicted and sentenced to life alongside his brother for a 1989 bank robbery and killing. The case against him turned almost entirely on fingerprints matched to Agofsky — a type of forensic evidence that, while ubiquitous, has since been revealed to be often unreliable, especially given the analytical techniques used at the time.
It was not until Agofsky was sentenced to die that he was able to secure lawyers who investigated both his cases and found evidence questioning his original conviction. Though records in his case remain under seal, he argues that they expose his wrongful conviction — and that Biden’s commutation order came just as he was “on the cusp” of proving his innocence.
Agofsky wrote in an email that he would do “whatever it takes, go to any lengths, to prove that my brother and I did not rob a bank, or kill a banker.” At their 1992 sentencing, his brother Joseph accused the government of manufacturing evidence, telling the court “our innocence will be proven eventually.” Joseph Agofsky died in prison in 2013.
In his legal filing, Agofsky invoked the “heightened scrutiny” courts are supposed to give death penalty cases. “To commute his sentence now, while the defendant has active litigation in court, is to strip him of the protection of heightened scrutiny,” he wrote.
Len Davis, the second man who challenged his commutation in December, for his part argued that he “has always maintained that having a death sentence would draw attention to overwhelming misconduct” in his case.
Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, was convicted and sentenced to death for ordering the murder of a woman who had allegedly filed a complaint against him. Unlike Agofsky, he has no pending appeals remaining. But Davis told me that he is not afraid that his lawsuit would leave him vulnerable to execution. “First, I’m a Born-Again believer in Jesus The Christ,” he wrote in an email. “I can’t be scared with a trip to heaven.” What’s more, he argued, “Trump should be able to empathize with me about D.O.J Misconduct.” He hopes that by rejecting a commutation, he will draw more attention to his innocence claim — and possibly receive a pardon.
On January 14, federal prosecutors filed responses to the emergency petitions, calling the judge’s doubts about his power to block a commutation order “well-founded.” Under existing case law, “a prisoner’s consent is not necessary when the President unconditionally commutes a federal death sentence to a life sentence,” they wrote. Two days later, a lawyer appointed to represent Agofsky and Davis summarized their arguments in response, but ultimately agreed with the government that the court “does not have the power to block” the commutations.

https://theintercept.com/2025/01/18/biden-federal-death-sentence-commutations/

(Source: theintercept.com, 18/01/2025)

CHINA: DEATH PENALTY UPHELD FOR MAN CONVICTED OF TRAFFICKING CHILDREN
INDIA: 5 MEN SENTENCED TO DEATH FOR RAPE-MURDER OF CHHATTISGARH GIRL
IRAN - Ahmad Sasouli executed in Yazd on January 22
IRAN - Omid Besharatlou and Javad Jaberi executed in Karaj (Ghezel Hesar) on January 22
IRAN - Lawyer of Pakhshan Azizi: Execution Temporarily Halted
BANGLADESH: THREE TO BE HANGED FOR 2013 MURDER IN SAVAR
IRAN - Unidentified man executed in Saveh on January 22
SAUDI EXECUTES MAN CONVICTED OF TERRORISM
IRAN - Karim Faridi executed in Zanjan on January 21
IRAN - Saeed Diani executed in Isfahan on January 21
IRAN - Online conference in support of the #NoToExecutionTuesdays campaign
CHINA: TWO MEN EXECUTED FOR COMMITTING DEADLY ‘REVENGE ON SOCIETY CRIMES’
IRAN - Gholamreza Seyed Mohammadkhani and Aref Azizi executed in Mashhad on January 20
USA - Among First-Day Executive Orders, Trump Issues Order on the Death Penalty
USA - Khalid Shaikh Mohammed Agrees to Use of Disputed Confession for Life Sentence
IRAN - Court sentences pop star Tataloo to death for blasphemy
IRAN - Bahram Valipour and Hossein Farhadi executed in Gorgan on January 19
IRAN - Two Iranian supreme court judges shot dead
IRAN - Mass Executions Behind The Elimination of Iranian Judges
USA - Biden grants clemency to 2490 convicted of non-violent drug offences
IRAN - Saman Yasin arrives in Germany
TAIWAN EXECUTES DEATH ROW INMATE CONVICTED IN 2013 MURDERS
IRAN - Saiwan Yaqoubi executed in Sanandaj on January 16
IRAN - Rashid Zeinabi and Saman Davoudian executed in Khorramabad on January 16
USA - Department of Justice Withdraws Federal Execution Protocol
IRAN - Third man executed in Khorrambad on January 16
TAIWAN: DEATH PENALTY UPHELD FOR MURDERER OF MALAYSIAN STUDENT
INDIA: ORISSA HC COMMUTES DEATH PENALTY OF 9 TO LIFE SENTENCE
IRAN - 3 men executed in Shiraz on January 15
PAKISTAN: PESHAWAR HIGH COURT BLOCKS DEPORTATION OF OVER 100 AFGHAN MUSICIANS

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