USA | They were on federal death row. Now they may go to a supermax prison.

A group of federal prisoners filed a lawsuit this week accusing the Trump administration of seeking to move them to a supermax prison to face tougher conditions as punishment for having their death sentences commuted by President Joe Biden.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized Biden’s decision to commute the sentences of 37 federal death row inmates to life in prison without parole. After his inauguration, Trump ordered that the former death row prisoners be housed “in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”

In court filings on Wednesday, 21 of the prisoners said that as a result of Trump’s order, they were going to be sent to a federal prison known as “ADX” in Florence, Colorado, to face what they called “the most oppressive conditions in the entire federal prison system.”

The Federal Bureau of Prisons says ADX is “a unique facility designed to house inmates who pose the greatest risks to staff, other inmates and the public.” The former death row inmates describe it in their lawsuit as a remote, brutally isolating facility and said they are only being sent there because of Biden’s commutations.

The lawsuit, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, said the prisoners feared they could be moved to ADX from a federal prison in Indiana starting as soon as next week. In a court filing Thursday evening, the Justice Department said that “no final decision” had been made about any of the prisoners in the lawsuit and that none would face potential transfer until at least May 16.

A spokesman for the department declined to comment. The Bureau of Prisons said in a statement that it did “not comment on pending litigation or matters that are the subject of legal proceedings.”

Brian Stull, an attorney for the prisoners who sued, said “they feel devastated” to face potential transfers to ADX after having their sentences commuted.

“Nobody’s looking at how well they did in prison, or their rehabilitation,” said Stull, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Capital Punishment Project. “They’re just assuming they are the worst of the worst by virtue of their death sentences.”

He noted that the prisoners’ death sentences stemmed from a mix of factors, including whether his clients faced particularly aggressive prosecutors or had poor attorneys. The crimes involved, he said, were similar to many committed by people given life sentences by juries, through plea agreements or because prosecutors never sought the death penalty.

Trump has been a vocal supporter of capital punishment, and his administration has pledged to ramp up its use, including by seeking more death sentences.

During Trump’s first term, the Justice Department carried out 13 federal executions. Biden campaigned as an opponent of the death penalty, though his administration took a mixed approach, halting federal executions while defending existing death sentences and seeking new ones.

Opponents of the death penalty had pushed Biden to empty death row, fearing Trump would restart federal executions upon retaking office. The outgoing president in December commuted the sentences of all but three federal death row inmates: The surviving Boston Marathon bomber, and the gunmen convicted of bigotry-fueled massacres inside a Charleston, South Carolina, church and a Pittsburgh synagogue. All three were sentenced during Biden’s time as president or vice president.

The death penalty’s use has plummeted nationwide in recent decades, with fewer new death sentences and fewer executions. A Washington Post examination last year found that many of the more than 2,000 people on death row — largely held by states, not the federal government — were likely to die there without being executed.

In recent weeks, the Justice Department has begun taking steps to pursue new federal death sentences. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that she had directed prosecutors in New York to seek a death sentence for Luigi Mangione, who is charged with killing a health insurance executive there last year.

Last week, Bondi announced she had also authorized prosecutors to seek death for a federal inmate at ADX accused of killing another inmate there in 2020.

The lawsuit filed by the former federal death row inmates accuses Bondi and Emil Bove, one of her top deputies, of ignoring normal processes to have people given clemency by Biden transferred to ADX.

The lawsuit said “sham” hearings were held to conclude that the prisoners should be sent to ADX, calling the effort a “vindictive” punishment fueled by Trump’s animus.

“We have some very medically fragile clients,” said Stull, their lawyer. “We do not know if all of our clients can survive this transfer.”

Source: The Washington Post, Mark Berman, April 18, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde