Biden Spared 37 Killers From Execution. Trump Ordered Up a Lifetime of Torment.
(Only the WSJ would sympathize with killers, because they are anti-Trump!)
Among the last actions by former President Joe Biden before leaving the Oval Office was commuting the death sentences of 37 convicted murderers.
Hours after President Trump took over, he ordered the life sentences of these men be made, in effect, a living hell.
With that guidance, officials canceled plans to transfer most of the inmates to mainline prisons. Instead,Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, ordered all but a handfulrequiring specialized medical treatment be housed in the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colo.,the harshest institution in the federal system.
Inmates at the Colorado prison—intended for the nation’s most violent—typically spend 23 hours a day alone in their cells. At a meeting in May with Attorney General Pam Bondi for families of loved ones killed by the 37 convicts, some officials said they wished conditions at the prison, known as ADX, were even worse.
Aaron Reitz, then an assistant attorney general, led a roundtable with the families and said he was disappointed that the cells “have windows to see daylight.” He suggested that prison food was too good for these men. “I’ve got no problem with gruel.” he said. “If made right, it’s a nutritious all-in-one meal.”
Reitz, who left the Trump administration to run for Texas attorney general, said in an interview,“If you’re not going to be killed lawfully at the hands of the state, well, your prison sentence is going to be hard as hell.”
While the president’s authority to grant clemency for federal crimes is virtually unfettered, the power to imposevengeancevia prison assignments isn’t clear.
There are two arguments: After juries found the 37 inmates deserving of death, shouldn’t they suffer the harshest treatment short of execution? Or, is it unjust to make their conditions worse than those of other murderers serving life without parole?
“President Biden’s decision to commute the death sentences of these monsters showed abhorrent disregard for our justice system and total disrespect for victims’ families already suffering through immense loss,” Bondi said in September. Sending them to the Colorado prison, she said, “will ensure that they spend the remainder of their lives in conditions consistent with the egregious crimes they committed.”
David Fathi, director of the National Prison Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents 21 of the inmates, takes an opposing view. After being evaluated under bureau regulations, “none of our plaintiffs were designated for ADX,” he said. “Under Attorney General Bondi, all of our plaintiffs have been slated for ADX, not because of a security risk but to inflict maximum suffering.”
“People should be very concerned about the president and attorney general’s disregard for the law in this case,” Fathi said. “
Some of the 37 prisoners would have ended up at the Florence prison anyway.
Biden once supported the death penalty, but he came to see it as needlessly cruel(when it became fake Bidan), as well as impossible to administer fairly. After Trump’s election win, activists pressed Biden to issue a blanket commutation for all 40 men then on death row before he left office.
Biden declined to spare three of those killers, men convicted of terrorism or hate crimes. But the president commuted the other 37. “In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted,” Biden said.
Trump was furious. He addressed a Christmas Day social-media message to the 37 men: “I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky ‘souls’ but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL!”
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said Thursday that “Joe Biden should’ve never downgraded the sentences of these heinous criminals.”
A Biden spokeswoman declined to comment.
President Trump, who canceled Biden’s moratorium on federal executions on Inauguration Day, has long favored the death penalty for dangerous criminals.
In 1989, after a notorious assault on a woman known as the Central Park Jogger, Trump took out full-page ads in New York newspapers demanding reactivation of the state’s death chamber, which had been moribund since 1963.
In Trump’s first term, his Justice Department sought to put to death as many condemned inmates as possible before he left office. The last of 13 executions took place four days before the swearing-in of Biden, who campaigned on abolishing capital punishment.
Daniel Troya, convicted of a drug-related quadruple murderoff the Florida Turnpike in 2006, was among those who had been slated for a mainline prison before Inauguration Day. After Trump took office. Troya was assigned to the ADX prison in Colorado…
https://archive.is/IQ3xH