Summary
Two federal death row inmates, Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, are challenging President Joe Biden’s commutation of their death sentences to life without parole.
They argue the commutations harm their legal appeals, stripping them of heightened judicial scrutiny and legal counsel access.
Agofsky is contesting convictions for a 1989 murder and a 2001 prison killing, while Davis, a former police officer, was convicted for orchestrating the 1994 murder of a civil rights complainant.
Biden’s clemency, excluding three high-profile cases, commuted 37 federal death row sentences, a historic number.
My guess is that accepting that also means admitting to the alleged crimes. Both of these people seem to want to be proven innocent rather than guilty but not set for execution.
Edit: I did no research on either case nor know if I am correct.
- There’s this idea going around that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt. This is false and there is a court decision saying so.
- This is a commutation, not a pardon.
If you’re referring to Burdick, then you have it backwards. Burdick explicitly states that a pardon carries an “imputation of guilt” and that accepting the pardon is “a confession to it”.
Probably was referring to this case.
That wasn’t part of the holding in Burdick. It was part of the dicta according to a Federal Appeals Court.
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Lol what are you being pardoned for if not the guiltiness of being convicted.
Do you even understand what the word guilty means?
They’re already guilty.In some cases, you can be pardoned on the basis of actual innocence.
Just because you have been found guilty does not mean that you cannot subsequently have that finding overturned on appeal. Procedurally, there are a bunch of rules on how that happens; and death row inmates are given more appelet rights than those with life sentences. By having their sentences commuted to life, those would inmates may lose some of their extra appelet writes.
Davis, a former police officer, was convicted for orchestrating the 1994 murder of a civil rights complainant
If Biden was trying to protect them from getting executed by Trump, I don’t think that one had anything to worry about.
But, it might fuck up Davis’s appeals.
It’s a bold move Cotton, let’s see if it pays off
