There are some prisoners on death row in the US who are refusing to accept a presidential pardon from Joe Biden in the final days of his administration.
Biden would have been leaving the White House anyway this January, as he announced he would not seek a second term. This followed a woeful debate performance, where he looked every inch the octogenarian who couldn’t hack it any more that his critics decried him as.
But since his party lost the election, it’ll be Donald Trump and the Republicans returning to office.
Trump’s final days in his first term as president saw a slew of executions carried out, with his government rushing through a number of cases and flying in the face of American precedent to pause putting prisoners to death during a presidential transition.
In the last days of his administration, Biden is taking a somewhat different approach, having issued a pardon to 37 of the 40 Federal inmates facing the death sentence.
This won’t release them from prison, but rather commute their sentence from death to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. Essentially, they’ll never get out of prison, but they won’t be executed.
However, two of the 37 Federal prisoners who have been offered a pardon are refusing to sign the paperwork that would spare them a trip to the execution chamber.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis are both incarcerated at the Federal Correctional Complex, Terre Haute, Indiana, but on 30 December, they filed emergency motions to block having their death sentences commuted.
Agofsky was convicted in 1989 of murdering Dan Short, a bank president in Oklahoma. Prosecutors said Shannon and his brother Joseph abducted and killed Short before dumping his body in a lake and stealing $71,000 from his bank.
A jury did not convict Joseph of murder, but he was given a life sentence for the robbery and died in prison in 2013, while Shannon received a life sentence and got the death penalty in 2004 after being convicted of stomping fellow inmate Luther Plant to death in 2001.
Len Davis is a former New Orleans police officer who was convicted in 1994 of murdering Kim Groves. She had filed a complaint against him claiming he beat a teenager in her neighbourhood.
Prosecutors said that Davis hired a drug dealer to kill Groves. His initial death sentence had been thrown out by an appeals court but was reinstated in 2005.
The reason why both men do not want to sign the pardon is because they continue to claim their innocence.
In his filing, Agofsky, 53, says he is disputing how he was charged with murdering Luther Plant and also wants to ‘establish his innocence in the original case for which he was incarcerated’.
His filing says: “The defendant never requested commutation. The defendant never filed for commutation. The defendant does not want commutation, and refused to sign the papers offered with the commutation.”
NBC reports that Agofsky’s wife, who married him in 2019, said his lawyers recommended that he accept Biden’s pardon, but he refused, because as a death row inmate, he gets legal counsel that is important to his appeals.
The filing from Davis, 60, says that he ‘has always maintained his innocence and argued that federal court had no jurisdiction to try him for civil rights offenses’.
The three remaining Federal inmates who did not have their death sentences commuted were involved in mass killings or terrorist attacks.
Speaking about his decision to commute the sentences of 37 death row inmates, Biden said: “I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.
“In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
