Two federal prisoners whose death sentences were recently commuted by President Biden have asked a judge to block the reduction in their sentences, arguing that it could jeopardize their appeals.
The prisoners, Len Davis and Shannon W. Agofsky, said in separate court filings that they had refused to sign paperwork offered with the commutations, which would spare them from execution and reduce their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Both men were among 37 prisoners on federal death row whose death sentences Mr. Biden commuted on Dec. 23, less than a month before Donald J. Trump returns to the Oval Office with a promise to restart federal executions.
In issuing the commutations, Mr. Biden said he was “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
But Mr. Davis and Mr. Agofsky said that they never requested a commutation and did not want one. Both men, who are prisoners at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., filed emergency petitions on Dec. 30 asking a judge to prevent their commutations from taking effect.
Mr. Agofsky, 53, was serving a life sentence for a 1989 murder when he was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing another prisoner. In his petition, he said that if he were removed from federal death row, it would make it harder for him to challenge his conviction because it would strip him of the heightened legal scrutiny that comes with federal death penalty cases.
“He is not seeking favors,” Mr. Agofsky wrote in his petition, filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. “He merely wishes for his case to play out in court as it was meant to, within the protection of heightened scrutiny, and without the interference of partisan politics.”
Mr. Davis, 60, a former New Orleans police officer, was sentenced to death in 2005 for having ordered the murder of a woman who filed a brutality complaint against him. In his petition, also filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana, he said that he has always maintained his innocence.
Having a death sentence, Mr. Davis said, would “draw attention to the overwhelming misconduct” he believes the Justice Department committed in his case. He thanked the court for its “prompt attention to this fast-moving constitutional conundrum.”
Mr. Davis’s and Mr. Agofsky’s requests to block their commutations were reported by NBC News. Both prisoners hand-wrote their petitions and are representing themselves in court. They could face an uphill battle because of a 1927 Supreme Court ruling, legal experts said.
In that case, the court ruled 8-0 that a prisoner who had been sentenced to death could not reject a commutation from President William Howard Taft that reduced his sentence to life in prison and resulted in him being transferred from a jail in Alaska to a penitentiary in Kansas. (Taft, by then the chief justice, did not take part in the case.)
The prisoner argued that the commutation had been issued without his consent. But Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote that the president did not need the prisoner’s consent for the commutation to take effect.
“Just as the original punishment would be imposed without regard to the prisoner’s consent and in the teeth of his will, whether he liked it or not, the public welfare, not his consent, determines what shall be done,” Holmes wrote.
Because of that ruling, both Mr. Davis and Mr. Agofsky “have got a pretty strong Supreme Court case against them that they would have to overcome,” Mark Osler, a professor at the University of St. Thomas School of Law in Minneapolis, said in an interview on Tuesday. “It definitely is pretty clearly on point.”
At the same time, Professor Osler said that the men could argue that the paperwork they were given to sign, depending on what it said, implied that the government was asking for their consent. “And so part of their argument could be that the administration itself made it conditional on their acceptance by sending them a form to sign,” he said.
He noted that the case was unusual in that it could expose the men to the risk of execution as they pursue their legal appeals. If the men were trying to prove their innocence, he said, “the fear is that accepting forgiveness and mercy implies guilt.”
Robin M. Maher, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit organization that collects data on the death penalty, said the 1927 Supreme Court ruling indicated that even if the men did not want commutations, they could not legally reject them.
“While it’s understandable that Mr. Davis and Mr. Agofsky have concerns about what will happen next in their cases, their objections will have no effect,” Ms. Maher wrote in an email. “The president’s power to commute their death sentences is grounded in his constitutional authority and is absolute.”
