Two prisoners whose death sentences former President Joe Biden commuted to life without parole have been transferred to a notorious prison in Colorado.
Aquilia Barnette and Len Davis had been incarcerated at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute for unrelated murders in North Carolina and Louisiana. Both were facing possible execution at the facility, which houses federal death row, until Biden's mass clemency weeks before leaving office in December.
Read more: 8 former death row prisoners transferred to ADX
“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 said in a statement provided by spokesperson Tuesday. "This Department of Justice will continue to seek accountability for the families blindsided by President Biden’s reckless commutations of 37 vicious predators."
Barnette and Davis will join eight other former federal death row prisoners transferred to USP Florence ADMAX in September.
The prison bureau began the process for transferring the Biden commutation recipients shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office in January.
Trump opposed the mass clemency decision and had repeatedly criticized Biden for reducing the sentences. At the time, Biden said the clemency was intended to prevent Trump from restarting executions at the Terre Haute prison, where all federal executions take place. The first Trump administration ended a 17-year execution moratorium, carrying out 13 lethal injections in six months.
Read more: Judge won't block transfers to 'supermax'
On Tuesday, a U.S. justice department spokesperson said that most of the 37 would be transferred to ADX by early next year.
Critics of the plan include the American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the majority of the former death row prisoners in legal action seeking to stop the transfers. They accuse the Trump administration of using the Colorado prison as a tool of retribution against political opponents, including Biden.
The prison, known as ADX, is considered the most secure and restrictive facility in the federal prison system, designed to hold the fraction of inmates considered to be unmanageable in regular prison settings.
Read more: Terre Haute prisoners sue to stop ADX transfers
" It's not there for rehabilitation. Let's take that off the table," Robert Hood, a former warden at ADX, said in an interview Tuesday. "If you're teaching criminal justice, take that off the table because you're not going there for rehabilitation."
Hood criticized the administration's plan to relocate the group of former death row prisoners. He said that during his time as warden, from 2000 to 2005, months would go by without a single prisoner being transferred there. He said that was unsurprising considering the prison's intended purpose as a destination of last resort, often only temporarily, for those who can't be managed in other settings.
Hood also said that he understood why most of the prisoners who received clemency from Biden were fighting to remain in Terre Haute rather than face the extreme isolation conditions at ADX, which are far more restrictive than even death row.
Read more: Prisoners heading to ‘Alcatraz of the Rockies’
"I guarantee you there's not one that's being transferred to ADX that hasn't heard the stories," Hood said. "Because that's a slow death. That's a death that's every single day versus an injection that's gonna take minutes to occur," he said.
"I think from the general public, the average person is thinking that it's a dropdown. 'Oh my gosh, they were on death row. Now they're just going to the supermax in Colorado.' That's because they don't know enough about it."
