A federal judge in Washington, D.C., is blocking the Trump administration from transferring prisoners on federal death row in Indiana to a more restrictive facility in Colorado, ruling the move would likely violate due process rights.
The 20 prisoners, housed at the U.S. penitentiary in Terre Haute, are among 37 whose death sentences former President Joe Biden commuted to life without parole in December 2024. Upon returning to the White House, President Donald Trump, who opposed the commutations, issued an executive order instructing U.S. justice officials “to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
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Days later, the prisoners received notices indicating they were being evaluated for ADX, nicknamed “the Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
Last May, the prisoners sued the administration arguing that they were being singled out for punishment for Biden’s decision to spare their lives. They also argued the decision had been decided in advance rather than as the result of an impartial, individualized assessment process the prison bureau is required to follow.
“Plaintiffs have shown that it is likely their redesignations to ADX Florence were predetermined before they received any process at all, and they had no meaningful opportunity to be heard,” U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote in his opinion, issued Wednesday, and that the U.S. 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.”
Kelly, who was appointed by President Trump, issued the preliminary injunction days after a deputy attorney general informed the court that the Federal Bureau of Prisons was preparing to transfer almost all of the prisoners who remain on federal death row in Indiana to ADX Florence within the next several weeks.
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The American Civil Liberties Union, which is representing the prisoners, applauded the injection and called to make it permanent.
“Judge Kelly’s decision makes clear that the Trump administration cannot disappear people to the harshest prison in the federal system to score political points,” ACLU attorney David Fathi said Thursday.
“This injunction ensures that our clients will not be subjected to extreme and irreversible harm before their Constitutional claims are heard. The court must now permanently block these transfers and require the federal Bureau of Prisons to return to its long-standing, individualized placement process,” Fathi said.
The ruling prevents the government from moving the prisoners to ADX until the case challenging the designations has concluded.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Department of Justice didn't immediately respond to a request for comment Thursday.
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The decision has no immediate impact for 12 prisoners the government who were not part of the lawsuit and moved there last year.. Some of those prisoners have argued that they, too, should be allowed to be transferred somewhere other than ADX, either because they do not have serious disciplinary records or because of mental and physical health needs that cannot be met at ADX.
“I meet none of the criteria to be placed in general population here,” Len Davis, who was transferred to ADX in November, wrote in a letter to WFIU/WTIU News. “My record behind bars has been clear for over a quarter of a century.”
Davis wrote that he worked as an orderly on federal death row for five years, a job opportunity only available to prisoners with good behavior. His last “writeup” was in 1999, he wrote in the letter, mailed in late January.
Davis wrote that since arriving at ADX, he has not been allowed to use electronic messaging services that were available at Terre Haute: “All I have access to on computer is (the) law library — nothing else.”
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Davis, a former New Orleans police officer, was convicted of orchestrating the 1994 murder of a witness against him in an internal affairs investigation. He received a death sentence and spent decades awaiting execution in Terre Haute under Biden issued the mass clemency decision in late 2024.
Davis and another prisoner attempted to restore their death sentences in an unsuccessful lawsuit against the Biden administration that argued the commutations would make it harder to overturn their convictions.
