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FIRST ON FOX — Two federal inmates previously on death row — one a crooked New Orleans cop, the other behind a multi-state killing spree — have been transferred to a notorious “supermax” prison in Colorado, the Justice Department told Fox News Digital.
News of their transfers comes as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi looks to crack down on the previous administration’s sweeping clemency actions, especially those against violent crime.
The former death row inmates were transferred Thursday to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, also known as “ADX,” Justice Department officials confirmed.
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They are among the 37 death row inmates whose sentences former President Joe Biden commuted shortly before leaving office last December. The news prompted criticism and complaints that the record clemency and commutation actions were done as a political “Hail Mary” and without proper vetting.
Eight death row inmates have already been transferred to ADX, the Justice Department told Fox News Digital, bringing to 10 the number of death row inmates that have been transferred to the prison since mid-September.
More are expected soon. all 37 death row inmates commuted by Biden are expected to be moved to the prison by “early next year,” the Justice Department told Fox News Digital.
The effort comes as Bondi and the Trump administration have sought to reverse some of the Biden administration’s efforts on criminal justice reform, with an emphasis on cracking down on violent crime.
Though sentence commutations cannot be fully reversed, Justice Department officials told Fox News Digital, Bondi has prioritized ways to penalize these individuals in coordination with directives from Trump and to ensure that the “conditions of confinement” are “consistent with the security risks those inmates present because of their egregious crimes, criminal histories and all other relevant considerations,” according to an earlier DOJ memo.
“Two more monsters who plotted and violently murdered innocent people will spend the rest of their lives in our country’s most severe federal prison,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News Digital in a statement.
“This Department of Justice will continue to seek accountability for the families blindsided by President Biden’s reckless commutations of 37 vicious predators.”
Like the eight former death row inmates sent to Colorado’s supermax prison, the two criminals processed in ADX Thursday have been convicted of particularly heinous crimes.
One individual chased down his ex-girlfriend from Roanoke, Virginia, to Charlotte, North Carolina, where he cut phone lines to the apartment she was living in before using cans of gasoline to set the building on fire.
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Though she escaped via a second-story window and was hospitalized for second- and third-degree burns, he followed her back to her family’s home in Virginia two months later, where he gunned her down on the streets of her neighborhood and just steps from her mother.
Another inmate, a former New Orleans police officer known as “Robocop” for his large physical demeanor and aggressive law enforcement style, was caught on tape by the FBI as he ordered and orchestrated the killing of a mother of three who had come to the precinct hours earlier to submit a supposedly confidential brutality complaint about his behavior that she witnessed on her way home the night before.
The FBI had stumbled upon the conversation as part of a broader probe it had started to investigate a so-called “protection racket” between cocaine dealers in New Orleans and the city’s police force, which had been guarding a warehouse stocked with the drug. The same officer was later revealed as one of the chief conspirators in the protection racket.
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He was also found to have falsely testified in two murder cases, including one murder he has since been linked to. The statements were used to exonerate four men from prison, including three teenagers who had been wrongfully convicted of a murder 28 years earlier.
ADX is the only true federal “supermax” prison in the U.S., and its inmates are as notorious as the prison’s reputation.
Among them are Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers; former Sinola Cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán, or “El Chapo”; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the co-founder of al Qaeda.
Shortly after her confirmation as attorney general, Bondi issued a memo aimed at “restoring a measure of justice” to the victims’ families.
The measures granted by Biden earned more criticism than former President Barack Obama. As Fox News reported at the time, the vast majority of Obama’s clemency actions focused on commuting the sentences of federal inmates who met certain criteria outlined under his administration’s Clemency Initiative.
Bondi hosted victims’ families earlier this year to hear their concerns about the commutations, the DOJ said. Some said they had been stunned by the eleventh-hour commutations and that they had not been given a heads-up by the Biden administration.
In February, Bondi issued a memo to the Bureau of Prisons ordering an evaluation of where these prisoners should be detained.
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