Two Federal Death Row Inmates Refuse to Sign Paperwork Accepting Biden’s Commutation

Two federal death row inmates are refusing to accept Joe Biden’s act of clemency.

Joe Biden decided to prioritize child killers and murderers on his way out the door by commuting the death sentences of 37 of the 40 men on federal death row.

Two of the inmates who received a commutation from Biden are rejecting it because the clemency can put their appeals in jeopardy, according to NBC News.

Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, inmates being held at a prison in Indiana filed emergency motions to block Biden’s commutations.

Agofsky was convicted for murdering an Oklahoma bank president in 1989.

“Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, was convicted in the 1994 murder of Kim Groves, who had filed a complaint against him accusing him of beating a teenager in her Lower Ninth Ward neighborhood,” NBC reported.

“To commute his sentence now, while the defendant has active litigation in court, is to strip him of the protection of heightened scrutiny. This constitutes an undue burden, and leaves the defendant in a position of fundamental unfairness, which would decimate his pending appellate procedures,” Agofsky’s filing said according to NBC News.

NBC News reported:

Two prisoners who are among the 37 federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted last month by President Joe Biden — a move that spares them from the death chamber — have taken an unusual stance: They’re refusing to sign paperwork accepting his clemency action.

Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, both inmates at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, filed emergency motions in federal court in the state’s southern district on Dec. 30 seeking an injunction to block having their death sentences commuted to life in prison without parole.

The men believe that having their sentences commuted would put them at a legal disadvantage as they seek to appeal their cases based on claims of innocence.

The courts look at death penalty appeals very closely in a legal process known as heightened scrutiny, in which courts should examine death penalty cases for errors because of the life and death consequences of the sentence. The process doesn’t necessarily lead to a greater likelihood of success, but Agofsky suggested he doesn’t want to lose that additional scrutiny.

These two inmates aren’t the only ones taking action after Biden commuted their death row sentences.

Among the monsters and murderers on Biden’s list of commutations is career criminal Brandon Council.

In 2019, Brandon Council was convicted of the brutal double murders of bank workers Donna Major and Katie Skeen during a 2017 robbery.

Brandon Council is demanding to be released from prison after being emboldened by Biden’s act of mercy.

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