Two convicted murderers spared from execution by President Biden’s controversial clemency final month have requested a federal courtroom to allow them to keep on dying row.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis – each incarcerated on the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind. – have refused to signal paperwork that would cut back their sentences to life with out parole and filed emergency motions within the state’s southern district federal courtroom final week in an try to forestall Biden’s death-row reprieve from taking impact.
At concern is the idea by Agofsky and Davis – each of whom keep their innocence – that the 82-year-old president’s commutation places them at a authorized drawback as they attraction their circumstances, in line with NBC Information.
“To commute his sentence now, while the defendant has active litigation in court, is to strip him of the protection of heightened scrutiny,” Agofsky’s submitting said, in line with the outlet. “This constitutes an undue burden, and leaves the defendant in a position of fundamental unfairness, which would decimate his pending appellate procedures.”
In the meantime, Davis, describing his present state of affairs as a “ fast-moving constitutional conundrum,” argued that “having a death sentence would draw attention to the overwhelming misconduct” he alleges in opposition to the Justice Division.
As Agofsky famous, dying penalty appeals circumstances are extra intently examined for errors than different circumstances beneath the heightened scrutiny doctrine – a profit each males will lose if they’re now not going through capital punishment.
Case regulation doesn’t seem like on the inmates’ aspect, because the Supreme Courtroom dominated in a 1927 case {that a} “convict’s consent is not required” for the president “to grant reprieves and pardons.”
Agofsky was sentenced to dying in 2004 after he was convicted of stomping a fellow Texas jail inmate to dying three years prior.
Agofsky had been serving a life sentence on homicide and theft prices relationship again to the 1989 abduction and slaying of a financial institution president earlier than he was convicted of the 2001 jail killing.
“The defendant never requested commutation,” his submitting mentioned. “The defendant never filed for commutation. The defendant does not want commutation, and refused to sign the papers offered with the commutation.”
Agofsky, 53, claims he’s harmless within the 1989 financial institution president homicide case and disputes how he was charged within the stomping dying case.
“He doesn’t want to die in prison being labeled a cold-blooded killer,” his spouse, Laura Agofsky, advised NBC Information.
Davis, 60, is a former New Orleans, La., police officer who was convicted of hiring a hitman to kill Kim Groves in 1994 after she had filed a criticism in opposition to him.
Davis “has always maintained his innocence,” his submitting mentioned, additional arguing that the federal courtroom that convicted him didn’t have jurisdiction within the case.
Agofsky and Davis had been amongst 37 federal dying row inmates granted clemency by Biden, a listing that included a number of little one killers and mass murderers.
Three infamous federal inmates – Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers and Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof – weren’t granted commutations and stay on dying row.
