The Department of Justice argued that two prisoners on federal death row whose sentences President Joe Biden commuted should be required to accept the commutation despite their request to have the president’s order nullified.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, who are both being held in federal prison in Indiana, in a rare move, requested that federal courts nullify their death row commutations. A week after Biden issued their commutation, Agofsky and Davis filed emergency motions seeking an injunction to block the change, which they argued could affect their appeals as they claimed innocence in their initial convictions.
The Justice Department said that while not only are commutations legal, the president additionally has the authority to decide commutations and that a prisoner has “no authority to reject” one.
“The President’s commutation of a sentence ‘is the determination of the ultimate authority that the public welfare will be better served by inflicting less than what the judgment fixed,'” the U.S. attorneys wrote in response to Davis’s emergency motion.
“Allowing Davis to veto this action would encroach on this exclusive and ultimate authority that is ‘part of the Constitutional scheme,’” they wrote.
In response to Agofsky, the Justice Department said he failed to identify a “jurisdictional basis for his petition.”
Agofsky argued that being stripped of the death row status would lower his heightened scrutiny in his case or the process in which courts could reexamine death penalty cases for errors because of the consequences of the death sentence.
In addition to requesting an injunction, both men also asked for a co-counsel to be assigned to help them in the latest legal fight, which U.S. District Judge James Sweeney granted them.
Sweeney based some of his order on a 1927 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that states a president has the power to grant reprieves and pardons and that “the convict’s consent is not required.”
Sweeney did note in the order providing counsel to federal prisoners that their counsel was granted due to “purely a discretionary matter” because both men are no longer under death sentences, which is when inmates are entitled to counsel.
“Here, Mr. Agofsky is no longer under a death sentence,” Sweeney wrote. “Therefore, whether to appoint counsel is purely a discretionary matter.”
In 1989, Agofsky murdered a bank president, Dan Short, whose body was found in a lake in Oklahoma, and he was later given the death sentence after he killed a fellow inmate while serving time for the bank executive’s murder.
In 1994, Davis, who was on the New Orleans Police Department force, murdered Kim Groves, who had filed a complaint accusing him of beating a teenager. According to prosecutors, Davis hired a drug dealer to kill Grove. Davis’s original death sentence was thrown out by a federal appeals court but reinstated in 2005.
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According to court filings made last month, Davis “has always maintained his innocence and argued that federal court had no jurisdiction to try him for civil rights offenses.”
Davis and Agofsky are required to reply to the Justice Department’s response this week.