The 46 men who just got spared execution: What happens now that the Biden admin has halted federal executions

‘There’s not a day that goes by that we’re not scanning the news for hints of when or if the Biden administration will take meaningful action to implement his promise,’ federal death row inmate says

The Biden administration has halted federal executions after they were restarted by the Trump administration under then-Attorney General Bill Barr. The nation’s current top law enforcement officer, Merrick Garland, said in a memo that there were serious concerns about the “troubling number of exonerations” in cases where the prisoners have been given the death penalty.

The suspension was implemented as a review of death penalty procedures was launched.

“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States but is also treated fairly and humanly,” Mr Garland wrote in a memo to senior DOJ officials on Thursday. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.”

The 46 men currently on federal death row

There are 46 people currently on federal death row, all of them men. They are imprisoned in Terre Haute, in western Indiana. Out of the 46, 20 are white, 18 are Black, seven are Latino, and one is Asian, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.

Here are some of the men currently on federal death row.

Dylann Roof

Roof was sentenced to death for a federal hate crime after killing nine Black people at a historic African American church in Charleston, South Carolina on 17 June 2015. He was 21 years old at the time.

Prosecutors say Roof had visited the church before and knew that they would be holding a bible study session that evening. He sat next to the church’s pastor for 45 minutes before he pulled out his gun and started shooting as the parishioners closed their eyes in prayer. Out of the 12 people who attended the study session, only three survived.

Roof believed Jews and Freemasons were going to kill him as part of a ‘white genocide’ (Getty)

Roof asked an appeals court in late May of this year to overturn his sentence and conviction arguing that the judge ignored evidence about his delusions about white nationalists and that it was wrong to decide that Roof was fit to stand trial.

Judge Kent Jordan pressed Roof’s lawyer, saying that being mentally ill or being “a person who is full of hate” is not the same as being incompetent. Roof’s lawyer Sapna Mirchandani said that his mental illness had been confirmed by experts.

“This is actually a medically defined term that multiple experts said applied to him. It wasn’t just a belief,” she said. All of the three judges reviewing the case recused themselves and the process is expected to take a long time, The Washington Post reported.

Len Davis

A former New Orleans police officer, Davis, 56, was initially sentenced to death in 1996 on two federal civil rights charges. He conspired with a drug dealer to kill 32-year-old Kim Groves after she saw him beat up a young man and filed a complaint with the police department. Davis directed the drug dealer to kill Ms Groves, who was murdered just a day after filing the complaint.

Davis’ death sentence was reversed after his conviction for witness tampering was thrown out, but another jury sentenced him to death again in 2005.

In the community, Davis was sometimes called “Robocop” because of his large size, and the “Desire terrorist”, referring to a housing project in the city, because of his aggressive style of policing.

He was suspended from the job six times and received 20 complaints between 1987 and 1992 but also received the department’s Medal of Merit in 1993, according to PBS.

Last year, a federal appeals court denied a request from Davis for a new hearing, Nola reported.

Rejon Taylor and Daniel Troya

The Associated Press exchanged emails with four inmates through a system monitored by the prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, where federal death row inmates are housed. The 36-year-old Taylor, sentenced to death in 2008 for killing a restaurant owner in Atlanta, was one of them.

Biden’s campaign website stated that he would work to end federal executions, but how that would happen has never been specified.

“There’s not a day that goes by that we’re not scanning the news for hints of when or if the Biden administration will take meaningful action to implement his promises,” Taylor told the AP in March of this year.

The death row prisoners expressed relief at Donald Trump’s departure from the White House after he presided over more federal executions than any other president in 130 years.

They described death row as a close-knit community where bonds are forged. All said they were still reeling from seeing friends escorted away for execution by lethal injection at a garage-size building nearby.

“When it’s quiet here, which it often is, you’ll hear someone say, ‘Damn, I can’t believe they’re gone!’ We all know what they are referencing,” said Daniel Troya, sentenced in 2009 for participating in drug-related killings of a Florida man, his wife and their two children.

What happens now

Mr Garland wrote in his memo to Justice Department leaders that the deputy attorney general Lisa Monaco would lead a review of the department’s policies concerning executions on the federal level. The current policies were put in place by Trump AG Bill Barr.

After a 17-year period without executions, the DOJ restarted the practice in the summer of 2020 under Mr Barr’s leadership. The Trump Administration executed 13 people, three times the number of people that the federal government executed during the preceding 60 years, The New York Times writes.

White House spokesman Andrew Bates said President Biden supported Mr Garland’s decision to suspend federal executions.

“As the president has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions,” Mr Bates said.

Mr Garland has directed his department to review policies put in place over the last two years that made it possible to restart federal executions during the Trump administration.

The Associated Press contributed to this report