Two convicted murderers who were spared execution by President Biden’s controversial clemency last month have asked a federal court to allow them to remain on death row.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis, both incarcerated at the US Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., have refused to sign paperwork reducing their sentences to life without parole, and they filed emergency motions in the state’s southern district federal court last week to prevent Biden’s death-row reprieve from taking effect.
Agofsky and Davis, both of whom maintain their innocence, believe that the 82-year-old president’s commutation puts them at a legal disadvantage in their appeals, according to NBC News.
According to the outlet, “To commute his sentence now, while the defendant has active litigation in court, is to strip him of the protection of heightened scrutiny,” Agofsky stated in his filing.
“This constitutes an undue burden, and leaves the defendant in a position of fundamental unfairness, which would decimate his pending appellate procedures.”
Meanwhile, Davis described his current situation as a “fast-moving constitutional conundrum,” arguing that “having a death sentence would draw attention to the overwhelming misconduct” he claims against the Justice Department.
As Agofsky pointed out, death penalty appeals are more closely scrutinized for errors than other cases under the heightened scrutiny doctrine — a benefit both men will lose if they are no longer facing capital punishment.
Case law does not appear to be on the inmates’ side, with the Supreme Court ruling in a 1927 case that a “convict’s consent is not required” for the president “to grant reprieves and pardons.”
Agofsky was sentenced to death in 2004 after being convicted of stomping a fellow Texas prison inmate three years earlier.
Before being convicted of the 2001 prison killing, Agofsky was serving a life sentence for murder and robbery in connection with the 1989 abduction and murder of a bank president.
“The defendant never requested commutation,” the filing stated. “The defendant never applied for commutation. The defendant does not want commutation and has refused to sign the papers offered with it.”
Agofsky, 53, maintains his innocence in the 1989 bank president murder case and questions how he was charged in the stomping death case.
“He doesn’t want to die in prison being labeled a cold-blooded killer,” his wife, Laura Agofsky, told NBC News.
Davis, 60, is a former New Orleans police officer who was found guilty of hiring a hitman to kill Kim Groves in 1994 after she filed a complaint against him.
Davis “has always maintained his innocence,” according to his filing, and he argues that the federal court that convicted him lacked jurisdiction over the case.
Agofsky and Davis were among 37 federal death row inmates granted clemency by Biden, including several child murderers and mass murderers.
Three notorious federal inmates—Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Pittsburgh synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, and Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof—were denied commutations and remain on death row.
