Two of the 37 federal prisoners whose death sentences were commuted to life in prison without parole last month by Joe Biden are refusing to accept the action.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, both currently held at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, filed emergency motions in court on 30 December seeking injunctions to block the commutation of their death sentences.
The two men argue that accepting the commutations puts them at a legal disadvantage as they are seeking to appeal their cases.
“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,” according to Agofsky’s filing, first reported by NBC News.
Agofsky’s wife told NBC News the concern was he would lose legal counsel provided to him if his sentence were commuted.
Agofsky received a life sentence after being convicted in 1989 in the robbery and killing of Oklahoma bank president Dan Short. While imprisoned in a Texas prison, he was convicted in the 2001 stomping death of another prisoner, placing him on death row.
In the filing, Agofsky is disputing how he was charged with the murder of the fellow prisoner and is trying to establish his innocence in the 1989 case.
Len Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, was convicted for the 1994 murder of Kim Groves, who had filed a civil complaint against him, accusing him of beating a teenager in her neighborhood.
Biden’s action marked the highest number of death sentences commuted by any American president in the modern era.
The clemency action applied to all federal death row inmates except three who were convicted of terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder. They were Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, convicted of attacking the Boston marathon; Dylann Roof, who shot dead nine Black church members in South Carolina; and Robert Bowers, who killed 11 worshippers in a synagogue in 2018.
