Two death row prisoners, who are among the 37 federal inmates (including several child killers and mass murderers) that President Joe Biden offered to commute their sentences last month, have taken an unusual stance in that they are refusing to sign their clemency paperwork and accept life in prison without parole.
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The two federal death row inmates who have refused to accept clemency from Joe Biden, resulting in life in prison without parole, have been identified as convicted murderers Shannon Agofsky, 53, and Len Davis, 60, both of which have maintained their innocence. The inmates, who are both incarcerated at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, have subsequently declined to sign documents that would commute (or reduce) their sentences to life in prison without parole.
On December 30, the two federal death row inmates instead filed emergency motions in Indiana’s Southern District Federal Court in an attempt to prevent their clemency from Joe Biden from taking effect. According to NBC News, the two men believe that by having their sentences commuted to life in prison without parole they would be at a legal disadvantage as they attempt to appeal their cases, wholly believing they were wrongfully convicted.
Death penalty appeals are closely examined by the courts in a legal process known as heightened scrutiny. The process sees the courts carefully probing death penalty cases for errors because of the life and death consequences of the sentence.
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While the process doesn’t necessarily lead to a 100% success rate, Agofsky suggested in his injunction that he does not want to lose the additional scrutiny should he be pulled from death row and no longer face capital punishment, as offered by Joe Biden. However, case law may not necessarily help the inmates in this situation as the Supreme Court ruled in a 1927 case that a “convict’s consent is not required” for the President “to grant reprieves and pardons.”
Agofsky’s filing reads, “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.”
Meanwhile, Davis wrote in his filing that he “has always maintained that having a death sentence would draw attention to the overwhelming misconduct” that he has alleged against the Department of Justice. He also said that he “thanks the court for its prompt attention to this fast-moving constitutional conundrum. The case law on this issue is quite murky.”
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Agofsky was sentenced to death in 2004 after being convicted of stomping a fellow Texas prison inmate to death in 2001. Before this, he was already serving a life sentence on murder and robbery charges dating back to the 1989 abduction and killing of a bank president. Agofsky claims that he is innocent of the 1989 bank murder and disputes his charges in the stomping death case.
Davis, a former New Orleans, Louisiana police officer, was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill Kim Groves in 1994 after she filed a complaint against him. Like Agofsky, Davis has “always maintained his innocence,” further arguing that the federal court that convicted him did not have jurisdiction in his murder case.
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