A prison in Terre Haute houses federal death row.
(AP Photo/Michael Conroy)
Twenty-one former death row prisoners at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute are suing President Donald Trump, Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Federal Bureau of Prisons to block their possible relocation to a high-security facility in Colorado.
The lawsuit, filed Tuesday by the ACLU and other rights groups in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, alleges that the Trump administration is seeking to punish 37 former death row prisoners who received clemency from former president Joe Biden.
Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 prisoners on federal death row weeks before President Donald Trump returned to the White House. Biden said he made the decision, in part, out of concern that Trump would seek to restart executions at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute that houses federal death row.
“Our lawsuit challenges this unilateral, categorical decision to move all people who received a commutation from President Biden — without any justification — as the unconstitutional act of political retribution that it is,” Corene Kendrick, deputy director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project, said in an interview Wednesday.
Kendrick said the U.S. prison bureau “upended its usual thorough, individualized process for looking at where people should be placed in the federal prison system.”
Instead, she said, the bureau “has categorically decided that all of these people, for no other reason than the fact that they received a commutation from Joe Biden, needed to be moved to the most harsh federal prison in the United States.”
Prisoners currently held in the “Special Confinement Unit,” or federal death row, say prison staff recently started holding administrative hearings about placements in other federal prisoners elsewhere in the United States. In almost every case, they say, prison officials are reaching the same conclusion: recommendation for placement at ADX. The prison in rural Colorado is considered the most secure in the United States. It’s where prisoners considered too dangerous for standard incarceration are held.
But many of the prisoners whose death sentences were overturned say they’ve never been deemed a risk to prison staff or fellow inmates. And yet, they are being routinely recommended for relocation at ADX as quickly as two hours after their hearings.
“The Bureau of Prisons is currently in the middle of holding these sham hearings where they are telling the incarcerated person that it doesn't matter that they have serious medical issues or serious mental health issues or that they're elderly, that every single one of them is going to go to ADX in Florence, Colorado,” Kendrick said.
The lawsuit points out that conditions at ADX are far harsher than at other prisons, including the federal prison in Terre Haute where they’re being held.
"It's basically a hole in a mountain in Colorado," says Robert Dunham, an attorney and executive director of the Death Penalty Policy Project.
"It is designed to hold those prisoners who pose the greatest national security risk and the greatest risk in a prison setting. It’s where terrorists have been sent. It's where people are sent when they cannot safely be housed anywhere else,” Dunham said.
The prisoners whose death sentences Biden commuted had not been previously assessed to meet the highest standard of dangerousness or notoriety, despite the seriousness of the crimes for which they received death sentences.
Had they been assessed as too dangerous for the prison in Terre Haute or other facilities, the bureau could have transferred any one of them to ADX at any point since their arrival in bureau custody. Two of the prisoners who were serving death sentences before Biden's commutations were already being held at ADX and remain there.
But the vast majority have served most or all of their sentences at the penitentiary in Terre Haute, including 12 men executed there in 2020 and 2021.
“We know that these people have not been a danger in the prison setting, so there is no rational basis to subject them to more restrictive housing circumstances,” Dunham said in an interview Friday, before the lawsuit had been filed.
“What appears to be happening is the current administration doesn't like the fact that they were commuted. And so it is taking action to subject these individuals to harsher circumstances. That's not something you're allowed to do in the United States,” he said.
A spokesperson for the U.S. prison bureau said that the agency doesn’t comment on pending litigation or matters subject to legal proceedings.
