A federal judge has denied a legal attempt, for now, to prevent the United States government from transferring death inmates whose sentences were switched by the then president Joe Biden to the “Supermax” in Colorado, the federal prison of highest security in the country.
The United States District Judge, Timothy Kelly, in Washington, DC, ruled on Tuesday against the issuance of a preliminary judicial order requested in a lawsuit filed by 21 of the 37 former death inmates, all of which saw their sentences changed without probation in December.
“The court cannot grant that reparation, at least not now,” Kelly wrote in his opinion, saying that the plaintiffs must first exhaust their administrative appeals within the transfer process of the federal prison office.
The decision occurs when Bop has said that it would not transfer to any of the plaintiffs to the “Supermax”, also known as the maximum administrative installation, or ADX, until at least end of May.
“The prison office offers an administrative process for the final designations challenging ADX, and the plaintiffs have not completed, or, according to the knowledge of the court, it even began, that process,” Kelly wrote. “Because the Court lacks discretion to add exceptions to the exhaustion requirement of the Congress, it will deny the motion of the plaintiffs for a preliminary court.”
Almost all federal death prisoners remain in the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, home of the death chamber of the United States government. The Biden Administration arrested federal executions during its presidency, a deviation from the first mandate of President Donald Trump, when 13 federal inmates were executed in a wave of executions not seen from President Grover Cleveland at the end of the 19th century.
The Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comments on Wednesday on the judge’s ruling.
The American Union of Civil Liberties, which is among the legal teams that represent the plaintiffs, said that it still believes that the inmates “can be safely housed in another part of the federal system”, and that the BOP agreed with that before the Trump administration department intervened.
“While the court ruled that he could not order the prison office to leave the plaintiffs instead while appealing their designations to ADX, the fight is far from ending,” said Brian Stull, deputy director of the Acu Capital Punition project, in a statement.
Trump criticized Biden’s switching effort, and on his first day he returned in January, he signed an executive order that requested that the United States attorney ensures that the prisoners convicted of death switching “are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they raise.” He also restored the federal death penalty.
The “Supermax”, which is found in a desert of a mile south of Colorado Springs, is also known as “The Alcatraz de las Rockies” for their isolated conditions and houses some of the high profile prisoners considered safety risks. Currently they include the King of the drug Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán and the domestic terrorists Eric Rudolph, the bomber of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, whose federal death sentence was not switched by Biden.
The former inmates of the death of death that challenge the government’s plan to transfer them to the “Supermax,” he said in his complaint, presented in April at the United States District Court for the Columbia district, which to do so would be unconstitutional.
Their legal teams said the convicted inmates received interviews in early April to assess whether they should be transferred to the “Supermax”. But the complaint alleges that the audiences were a “simulated” because the Bop had already designated some of them under a “security threat” classification that supposes that they are promoting violence or terrorist activity in gangs, and cannot be hosted safely in the general population.
The plaintiffs tried to show evidence that they are not threats, including the way in spite of being in the death corridor, they had successful program and clean disciplinary records, they were satisfying their medical care needs and would be harmful if they were “subjected to an extreme isolation in ADX,” according to the complaint.
“As expected, after the audience of each plaintiff, and in some cases in a matter of minutes or hours, the audience administrator recommended that ADX’s placement be” justified “for each of them,” says the complaint.
“By categorically condemning the plaintiffs to an indefinite imprisonment in hard conditions in response to their receipt of clemency of the previous president, the legal authority granted to the Attorney General and his attachment is exceeded, and is arbitrary, capricious and an abuse of discreet,” adds the suit.
The federal government said in its response to the complaint that the BOP has the legal authority to designate where the inmates can be held, the inmates went through a process of several layers and have had the right to appeal, and the “Supermax” inmates are not completely isolated.
According to the lawyers of the Department of Justice, the prison participates in a federal law known as the law of the first step, which “provides quarterly incentives to reward inmates for completing certain programs”, and can be offered “coffee, pizza and starbucks sweets that are not available in Commissionary.”
And unlike the special confinement unit in Terre Haute, “inmates in the ADX may have the opportunity to” resign “through a housing progression with less additional restrictions and freedoms to the point where they can be transferred from ADX completely to a high security institution,” said the government’s response.
Kelly concluded in his ruling that the Bop, in this case, would continue to follow what he has historically done by not transferring the inmates to the “Supermax” until the remedies for the appeal are worn.
“Of course, if the defendants transfer to any applicant to ADX before they conclude those appeals, or truncated those appeals unusually, such deviation from the ordinary practice of BOP would support the argument of the plaintiffs that the designation process in question is not usual for the office,” Kelly said. “And I would ask serious questions about who is calling the shooting: bop or someone out of that agency.”
