Judge Blocks Transfer of Former Death Row Inmates to Supermax

A federal judge has pressed pause on plans to move 20 former federal death row inmates to the nation's most restrictive prison, ruling the process that cleared the way for their transfer was likely "an empty exercise to approve an outcome that was decided before it even began." In a 35-page opinion, US District Judge Tim Kelly, a Trump appointee, said the men must remain at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, for now rather than being shipped to the "supermax" in Florence, Colorado, Politico reports. The inmates' death sentences were commuted by then-President Biden weeks before he left office.

Kelly stressed he wasn't questioning the inmates' convictions, which he said involved "some of the most horrific crimes imaginable," nor ordering their release. But he found that public statements by President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi effectively promised the men would be sent to ADX Florence, undercutting a Bureau of Prisons policy that allows such placement only in limited, risk-based circumstances. Kelly wrote that it "strains credulity" to think prison officials felt free to deviate from the wishes of "officials far senior to them, with authority over their careers and livelihoods." "Thus, it is likely that there was no genuine opportunity for Plaintiffs—at their hearings, during their appeals, or at any other time—to oppose their transfers to ADX Florence."

Kelly wrote that the paperwork behind the transfers "suggests a cookie-cutter process that yielded the same predetermined result," Newsweek reports. "The Constitution requires that whenever the government seeks to deprive a person of a liberty or property interest that the Due Process Clause protects—whether that person is a notorious prisoner or a law-abiding citizen—the process it provides cannot be a sham," he wrote. He blocked the Bureau of Prisons from transferring the inmates while a lawsuit over the transfers is ongoing. At least 10 of the 37 inmates whose sentences were commuted were transferred to ADX Florence last year.