They were sentenced to death. But they don’t want President Biden’s commutation to life in prison
CNN
Two federal death row inmates are asking to be exempted from outgoing President Joe Biden’s order commuting their sentences to life in prison without parole, as they seek to appeal their cases and prove their claims of innocence.
Two federal death row inmates are asking to be exempted from outgoing President Joe Biden’s order commuting their sentences to life in prison without parole, as they seek to appeal their cases and prove their claims of innocence. The inmates, Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, filed petitions in federal court on December 30, a week after Biden announced he would remove 37 out of 40 federal inmates from death row. The order did not include three inmates whose crimes included high-profile mass shootings or acts of terrorism. While other inmates and their attorneys viewed the commutations as a godsend, Agofsky and Davis refused to sign documents acknowledging them, according to their separate handwritten petitions. The US Justice Department argued in court filings this week the inmates’ requests should be denied, saying the president’s power to grant a commutation is absolute, limited only by the Constitution. Both inmates asked for the US Court in the Southern District of Indiana – which encompasses Terre Haute, where most federal death row inmates are held – to issue emergency orders blocking the commutations from proceeding, underscoring the complicated nature of both the commutations and the death penalty more broadly. “The defendant never requested commutation. The defendant never filed for commutation. The defendant does not want commutation,” wrote Agofsky, who was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing a federal inmate while serving a life sentence for another murder years earlier. Agofsky claims he is innocent of the 1989 killing and that errors marred his 2004 case. But a commutation to a life sentence would complicate his efforts to prove these claims, he wrote, by depriving him of the “heightened scrutiny” associated with death penalty cases.
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Two federal death row inmates are asking to be exempted from outgoing President Joe Biden’s order commuting their sentences to life in prison without parole, as they seek to appeal their cases and prove their claims of innocence.
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