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Two of the 37 inmates on federal death row whose sentences were commuted last month to life in prison without parole President Biden refuse mercy.
Shannon Agofsky, 53, and Len Davis, 60, both in the U.S. prison in Terre Haute, Indiana. According to court documents, they are refusing to sign paperwork accepting the president’s request for clemency because of the legal options available to them on death row.
The couple filed emergency motions in federal court on Dec. 30, seeking an injunction to block changes to their death sentences. They said accepting their commutations would eliminate the heightened scrutiny that death penalty appeals face.
Enhanced review is a judicial process in which courts examine cases such as death penalty appeals more closely for errors because these cases involve life or death.
Biden commuted the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates in the final month of his presidency
Two of the 37 federal death row inmates whose sentences were commuted to life in prison without parole by President Biden are refusing a pardon. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)
“Commuting his sentence now, while the defendant is actively being tried in court, means depriving him of the protection of increased control,” Agofsky’s filing says. “This imposes an undue burden and places the defendant in a situation of fundamental injustice that would decimate his pending appeals.”
Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, “has always maintained that a death sentence would draw attention to the Justice Department’s overwhelming misconduct,” he wrote in his filing.
But as Davis noted, the case law on the issue is “pretty unclear” and there is no guarantee that the two inmates’ death sentences will be reinstated.
Notably, the Supreme Court ruled in 1927 that a president could grant pardons and pardons without the consent of the condemned. Both inmates wrote in their files that they never requested commutation.
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A jury convicted Agofsky of the 1989 murder of Dan Short, an Oklahoma bank president. His body was found in a lake after prosecutors said Agofsky and his brother Joseph Agofsky kidnapped and killed Short before stealing $71,000 from the stole from the bank.
Joseph Agofsky was found not guilty of murder but sentenced to life in prison for the robbery. He died behind bars in 2013.
Shannon Agofsky was sentenced to life in prison after his conviction Murder and robbery charges. He was later convicted of the 2001 stomping death of fellow inmate Luther Plant while incarcerated in a Texas prison. A jury recommended a death sentence in this case in 2004.
A Texas jury recommended that Shannon Agofsky be sentenced to death after he was convicted of killing a fellow inmate while in custody. (AP)
Agofsky said in his filing last week that he disputed how he was charged with murder in Plant’s death and that he was also trying to “prove his innocence in the original case for which he was incarcerated.”
His wife Laura, who married him over the phone in 2019, told NBC News that his lawyers had encouraged him to seek commutation to the presidency but he refused because, as a death row inmate, he had been granted legal representation that was necessary for his Appeals are crucial. She said her husband still has lawyers assisting him in his case.
She told the outlet that simply commuting her husband’s sentence is “not a win for him” because she believes there is evidence that can prove his innocence.
“He doesn’t want to die in prison and be labeled a cold-blooded murderer,” she said.
Davis was found guilty in connection with this Murder in 1994 by Kim Groves, who, as a police officer, filed a complaint against him alleging that he had beaten a teenager in her neighborhood. Prosecutors accused Davis of violating Groves’ civil rights after accusing him of hiring a drug dealer to kill her.
A federal appeals court overturned Davis’ original death sentence, but it was reinstated in 2005.
Davis “has always maintained his innocence and argued that the federal court lacked jurisdiction to charge him with civil rights violations,” his filing says.
Only three of the 40 men on federal death row still face execution following President Biden’s commutation last month. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki, File)
Both Davis and Agofsky are urging a judge to appoint co-counsel in their motions for a preliminary injunction on the conversions.
The Ministry of Justice A moratorium on executions was issued during the Biden administration, but President-elect Trump has promised to expand federal executions when he returns to the White House later this month.
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“I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level,” Biden said in a statement last month. “In good conscience, I cannot allow a new government to resume the executions I stopped.”
The three death row inmates who were not granted clemency were Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing; Dylann Roof, who was convicted in the 2017 mass shooting at a church in Charleston, South Carolina; and Robert Bowers, who was convicted in the 2018 mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue.
