Two days before Christmas, in the waning days of his presidency, Joe Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 out of 40 federal prisoners to a life sentence. Only by hearing what they had done can we begin to grapple with their offense. Many of them were responsible for gruesome murders of multiple persons:
- Jorge Avila-Torrez “sexually assaulted and stabbed to death two girls — Laura Hobbs, 8, and Krystal Tobias, 9 — who had been riding their bicycles in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago in 2005. Four years later, he strangled naval officer Amanda Snell, 20, inside her barrack in Arlington, Virginia.” He subsequently admitted to these crimes. A year after that, he kidnapped, raped, and strangled a woman in a secluded area of northern Virginia, leaving her for dead by the side of a road. She survived and reported the crime to police, finally leading to his arrest and conviction.
- Anthony Battle “murdered an Atlanta prison guard with a hammer in 1994 while serving a life sentence for murdering his wife, a US Marine, in 1987.” Battle confessed that he killed the guard because he was “tired of being bossed around” and wanted to kill the first guard he saw. He showed no remorse. At Battle’s trial, three prison guards from the facility testified that Battle’s actions emboldened other prisoners to threaten staff because “without the death penalty, all prisoners … believe there is nothing that can happen to them.”
- Marvin Gabrion murdered 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman before she could testify in a 1997 rape case against him. He handcuffed her, covered her eyes and mouth with duct tape, wrapped her in chains, weighted her down with concrete blocks, and threw her into a lake alive. He also murdered Rachel’s 11-month-old daughter, whose body has never been found (Gabrion denies that he murdered her). The authorities were willing to take the death penalty off the table if Gabrion would only reveal where the 11-month-old’s body was. “Prosecutors say Gabrion is also responsible for the deaths of three men who have been missing since about the time of Timmerman’s murder: Robert Allen, a mentally disabled man from Kent County; Wayne Davis, who allegedly witnessed the sexual assault on Timmerman; and John Weeks, who allegedly lured Timmerman and her daughter to Gabrion before Timmerman’s murder.”
- Brandon Basham and Chadrick Fulks in 2002 carjacked, kidnapped, and killed two women, 44-year-old Alice Donovan of South Carolina and 19-year-old Samantha Burns of West Virginia, in the midst of a 17-day crime spree after they escaped a county jail in western Kentucky.
- Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas, Soviet-born immigrants, kidnapped five Russian and Georgian immigrants (four men, one woman, all but one between the ages of 29 and 39, the other 58) over a four-month period starting in 2001. They lured their victims with offers of business deals. They received more than $1 million in ransom but killed their victims by strangulation anyway and dumped their bodies in a reservoir near Yosemite National Park. Since being imprisoned, Mikhel and Kadamovas have hatched several escape plans.
- Thomas Sanders in 2010 killed a woman and her 12-year-old daughter. Sanders (53) was dating Suellen Roberts, 31. He invited her and her daughter Lexis to go on a three-day trip to a wildlife park near the Grand Canyon. “As they were returning to Nevada, Sanders pulled off Interstate 40 … and shot Suellen Roberts in the head” and kidnapped Lexis Roberts. “Sanders drove several days across the country before he murdered Lexis Roberts in a wooded area in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. … Sanders shot Lexis four times, cut her throat, and left her body in the woods. … At trial, the jury heard a recorded confession in which Sanders admitted killing the mother and daughter.”
- Alejandro Umaña in 2007 fatally shot two brothers, Ruben Garcia Salinas and Manuel Garcia Salinas, in a North Carolina restaurant. “Umana, a member of a gang, was having dinner at a Greensboro restaurant when he and two other patrons who did not belong to the gang ‘exchanged words.’ Prosecutors said Umana then pulled a semi-automatic pistol and shot the two men in the restaurant.”
- Daniel Troya and Ricardo Sanchez in 2006 stopped a car on the Florida Turnpike and shot to death an entire family: Jose Luis Escobedo and his wife Yessica along with their sons, Luis Julian, 4, and Luis Damian, 3, both of whom died in their mother’s arms. Their bodies were found in the grass alongside Florida’s Turnpike. The murders were motivated by a drug-debt involving Jose.
- Edward Fields, a former Oklahoma state prison guard, in 2003 killed a married couple, Charles and Shirley Chick, at a campground in Ouachita National Forest simply for the sport of it. “He scouted the couple at the campground in a homemade sniper suit and shot them with a rifle.”
- Kaboni Savage, a Philadelphia drug dealer, was convicted of killing or ordering the deaths of 12 people, including four children.
- Two gang members in Richmond, Virginia, were involved in a series of 11 drug-related murders that happened in a span of 45 days in 1992. James Roane was convicted in three of those murders; Richard Tipton of six murders.
- Julius Robinson, a wholesale drug dealer operating in five states, in 1998-99 murdered two men, Johnny Lee Shelton and Juan Reyes, and was also implicated in the death of a third person, Rudolfo Resendez. Robinson killed Shelton in a case of mistaken identity. Juan Reyes, “not the intended target,” “was shot to death at close range on the driveway in front of his home.”
- Aquilia Marcivicci Barnette in 1998 murdered two people, his ex-girlfriend and another man, in a carjacking.
- Brandon Council in 2017 murdered two bank employees, a teller and a bank manager, during the course of a bank robbery in South Carolina.
Prisoners Murder Other Prisoners
Nine persons whose death sentences were commuted to life by Biden were prisoners who had murdered other prisoners (add these to the one cited above who murdered a prison guard). In addition to satisfying moral justice, the threat of execution for prisoners who murder in prison provides some deterrence against committing murder in prison. Otherwise, prisoners who are already incarcerated for life have nothing further to fear. Some of those who murdered in prison were in prison for prior murders:
- Shannon Agofsky already had a life sentence for a murder he committed in 1989. He had kidnapped a bank president, Dan Short, forced him to open his Missouri bank, stole $71,000, drove him to Oklahoma, tied him “to a cement-weighted chair, and threw him in a lake” alive. While in prison in 2001, he beat to death 37-year-old Luther Plant, an inmate at a federal penitentiary in Texas.
- Joseph Ebron, who was in prison for two prior murders, in 2005 helped “in the stabbing death of fellow inmate Keith Davis at a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas. Ebron held Davis while another inmate stabbed him 106 times. That inmate later killed himself in prison.”
Other prisoners committed their first murder in prison:
- Mark Snarr and Edgar Garcia “were being transported to their cells in a federal Texas prison when the duo slipped from their hand restraints, pulled out homemade knives, and stabbed two correction officers. They took the cell keys from a guard’s belt and unlocked the cell of fellow inmate Gabriel Rhone.” They stabbed Rhone over 50 times, killing him.
- Charles Hall and Wesley Coonce in 2010 murdered fellow inmate Victor Castro-Rodriguez. “The duo targeted Castro-Rodriguez because he previously intervened to help a Bureau of Prisons Employee being attacked by another inmate. Coonce was already serving a life sentence for a kidnapping and carjacking that involved the rape of a woman. Hall was serving his sentence for making threats against a federal judge and federal prosecutor.”
- Christopher Cramer and Ricky Fackrell stabbed to death fellow inmate Leo Johns. All three were members of a pagan white supremacy group called “Soldiers of the Aryan Culture.” Cramer and Fackrell claimed that their aim was to punish Johns for violating their group’s rules against drinking and gambling, but matters got out of hand. Both men had prior convictions for robbery and violence and in prison had assaulted other inmates (Fackrell was charged with murdering another inmate a few months later).
- Carlos Caro, in prison on a 30-year sentence for drug dealing, in 2003 strangled his cellmate, Robert Sandoval, to death with a wet bath towel. Caro, a member of the Texas Syndicate prison gang, said that his reason for murdering Sandoval was that Sandoval ate Caro’s breakfast. Caro had previously stabbed a rival gang member 29 times.
Heinous Single Murders Outside Prison
Others who had their death sentences commuted to life imprisonment were involved in heinous single murders:
- Richard Jackson in 1994 kidnapped, raped, and murdered 22-year-old Karen Styles when she was going for a jog in Asheville, North Carolina. A hunter found her partially naked body duct-taped to a tree, with a gunshot wound to the head. Jackson later confessed to the crime.
- Daryl Lawrence in 2005 “shot and killed Columbus [Ohio] police officer Bryan Hurst during an attempted bank robbery.” This was his fourth bank robbery in little over a year. Hurst, 33, “was working special duty at the Fifth Third Bank … when Lawrence entered with a handgun and killed the officer during an exchange of gunfire.” Lawrence confessed to his crimes.
- Thomas Hager in 1993 was one of three men who entered the apartment of 19-year-old single mom, Barbara White, and “stabbed her 82 times. Hager’s accomplices said they worked for Hager, a crack cocaine dealer at the time, and received life sentences after testifying against him.”
- Meier Brown, in the course of attempting to steal three money orders totaling $1175 at a post office in Fleming, Georgia, in 2002, fatally stabbed postmistress Sallie Gaglia ten times so that she couldn’t identify him, then stole her wallet. Brown confessed to his crime.
- Billie Jerome Allen and Norris Holder were sentenced in 1998 for armed robbery of a St. Louis bank that resulted in the death of security guard Richard Heflin. What convinced the jury to vote for a death sentence was that “after [Heflin] had already been shot and wounded, Allen stood over Mr. Heflin with an assault rifle and shot him again, execution-style.” There appears to be no doubt about Holder’s involvement in the crime. However, some have argued that Allen’s conviction is a case of mistaken identity (see Amnesty International, Prisons and Justice Initiative, www.freebillieallen.com, a Jan. 14 op-ed in The Nation, and a Jan. 16 op-ed by Allen himself in Newsweek). But the evidence for Allen’s involvement appears strong.
- David Runyon, an army veteran, in 2007 shot five times and killed Cory Voss, a naval ensign, in a murder-for-hire plot staged by Voss’ wife Catherina and her boyfriend (both of whom got life sentences).
Murdering Witnesses
Several were on death row for involvement in murdering a witness against them.
- Ronaldo Mikos, a Chicago foot doctor who had defrauded Medicare of $1.8 million for foot surgeries that he never performed, shot six times and killed the one patient he could not dissuade from testifying against him, Joyce Brannon, a 53-year-old former nurse who was living in the basement of the church where she served as a secretary. Mikos confessed to the fraud but denied the killing. The circumstantial evidence of his guilt was compelling.
- Len Davis, a corrupt New Orleans police officer, in 1994 arranged with a drug dealer, Paul Hardy, to have Kim Groves killed for filing a complaint of police brutality against him. Davis had beaten a young man whom he mistook for a suspect in the shooting of a police officer, and Groves had witnessed the beating (both Davis and Groves were black). Unbeknownst to Davis, the FBI was wiretapping Davis’s phone as part of a sting operation against Davis and other cops for extorting money from cocaine dealers in exchange for protection. The phone surveillance disclosed Davis’s instructions to Hardy. Less than a day after filing her complaint against Davis, Groves was killed by a single bullet to the head fired by Hardy.
- Rejon Taylor with the help of two accomplices in 2003 robbed, carjacked, kidnapped, and murdered Atlanta restaurant owner Guy Luck. From 2001 to 2003 they engineered a scheme of robbing the mailboxes of rich Atlanta homeowners, including Luck. They decided to return to Luck’s home to ransack it for valuables. While doing so, Taylor uncovered a document indicating that Luck was planning on being a witness against Taylor. So they forced Luck into his own van, with Taylor driving from Atlanta to rural Tennessee. A confrontation developed in the car and Taylor fired three times at Luck, including once in the mouth, killing him.
The Three Whose Death Sentences Biden Did Not Commute and Why
Biden can’t claim complete opposition to the death penalty, for there were three persons whose death sentences he did not commute. The White House press release stated that Biden “believes that America must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.” Hence, he did not commute the death sentences of:
- Robert Bowers, the anti-Semitic murderer of 11 Jews at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018.
- Dylann Roof, the white-supremacist murderer of nine persons at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
- Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Islamic terrorist who planted bombs near the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing three people and injuring 264 others, then killed one police officer and critically injured another.
The debate then is not over whether the death penalty is justified over heinous murders but over what constitutes “heinous.”
Conclusion
Biden’s action in commuting nearly all federal death sentences to life sentences for heinous murderers should generate a sense of moral outrage. This moral outrage emanates not from a bloodthirsty desire for vengeance but from a sense of justice regarding the value and dignity of innocent life. Taking the innocent life of one made in God’s image, especially in particularly heinous murders such as the above, requires the forfeiture of the murderer’s life (see Genesis 9:6).
Attempts to argue against the imposition of the death penalty for particularly heinous murders fail. Yes, sometimes the innocent may be sentenced to death, but that concern appears not to apply to any of the above cases. Yes, sometimes racial bias may still rear its ugly head; but a justly applied capital sentence remains just even if another person in similar circumstances gets only a life sentence. Some question whether the threat of a death penalty has any deterrent effect. Yet such a threat does appear to deter some from prison violence among those who have nothing else to lose. It can also be used to coax offenders to divulge where a body has been hidden. Ultimately, though, deterrence and recovery of the deceased are secondary benefits. The chief benefit to society is the conveyance of justice and the value of innocent human life.