Joe Biden was hypocritical – and “blindsided” the victim’s daughter – when in December he commuted the death sentence given to a corrupt former police officer after he orchestrated the murder of a woman who filed a brutality complaint against him, according to the retired assistant US attorney whose job it was to prosecute the case.
In a guest column published on Friday by Louisiana’s Advocate newspaper, Michael McMahon said the clemency given to the ex-New Orleans policeman Len Davis was “morally depraved” – and not revealed to the family of Kim Groves, the slain woman, until virtually the last minute, all but violating US justice department policies designed to give victims’ loved ones a voice in such decisions.
“It is truly disappointing and shameful,” McMahon said. “I’m not being cynical; I’m being realistic.”
Many regard Groves’s killing as the reputational low point for the New Orleans police department, which since 2012 has been trying to achieve compliance on a reform pact – known as a consent decree – that the agency signed with the federal government after a civil rights investigation found decades of unconstitutional practices.
Groves had seen Davis pistol-whip a teenager in 1994, a year during which New Orleans registered its all-time high in killings: 424. She reported Davis to the police’s internal affairs division, and he was tipped off about Groves’s complaint within a day.
Davis subsequently arranged for a drug dealer to shoot Groves dead roughly a block away from her home. FBI phone taps aiming to expose Davis’s involvement in a protection racket ended up capturing evidence tying him to Groves’s killing, though agents were unable to prevent the mother of three from being killed.
McMahon, the prosecutor, later persuaded a federal jury to convict Davis of his role in Groves’s murder and to condemn him to death. But amid a labyrinthine appeals process, Davis was among 40 federal prisoners on death row as Biden prepared to leave office at the start of Donald Trump’s second presidency.
Biden on 23 December then commuted the death sentences of Davis and 36 others of those prisoners, changing their punishment to life imprisonment without parole. The only federal death row inmates exempted were convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder.
In his Advocate column, McMahon said he was unhappy that Groves’s younger daughter, Jasmine, only learned of Davis’s commutation the night before it was announced – “but after the decision had been made”. McMahon said he made that determination after personally speaking to Jasmine Groves, who told him that a member of the US attorney’s office in New Orleans called her only after the commutation, which was presented as “a fait accompli”.
McMahon said he believed that violated a justice department policy designed to afford “the family of any victim of an offense” being considered for clemency an opportunity to make “an oral presentation of reasonable duration”.
“Jasmine and her family were blindsided by Biden,” McMahon said. “The local US attorney’s office … tried to mollify her with the excuse that only ‘hate crimes’ were exempted from the commutations. Needless to say, she wasn’t impressed.”
McMahon also said he found it ironic that the crime for which Davis was convicted – civil rights murder – became eligible for the death penalty through a federal law that Biden himself championed when he was serving in the US Senate. Congress passed that law mere months before Groves’s murder.
Once nicknamed the Desire Terrorist by the New Orleans neighborhood he used to patrol, the 60-year-old Davis asked a judge to reinstate his death sentence after Biden’s commutation. McMahon said the maneuver demonstrated how Davis has been clinging to the “delusional belief” that an appellate court will eventually exonerate him as long as the specter of execution looms over him.
Yet, as McMahon wrote, “commutations and pardons do not depend on an inmate’s consent”.
“Davis’s rejection of the commutation does not mitigate in any way Biden’s hypocrisy,” added McMahon, 74, who retired in 2019. “I never gave up fighting for the justice the Groves family deserved. Biden’s misguided decision undid that work, now sparing the cop who orchestrated Kim’s murder from answering to the jury’s sentence.”
Jasmine Groves’s brother, Corey, was more forgiving of Biden in a brief conversation with the Guardian on the morning of 23 December. He said he has always wanted Davis to live as long as possible in prison rather than be executed ahead of his dying from natural causes, saying: “I think that’s worse than any death sentence.”
Family members of Groves received a $1.5m legal settlement from New Orleans city government in 2018 over her murder.
Meanwhile, three men who had been sent to prison for murder on falsified information that Davis supplied toward the end of his policing career were found to have been wrongfully convicted and freed in 2022.
