USA - Judge Timothy J. Kelly

USA - Constitutional protection for prisoners

March 2, 2026:

March 2, 2026 - USA. Constitutional protection for prisoners. Trump, Biden, federal commutees and a judge

Federal Judge Stops Trump from Making Death Row Prisoners Pay Because They Received Clemency from Joe Biden

(On this case see also HoC 11/02/2026 and 13/02/2026)

At this point, it seems obvious that President Donald Trump has little patience for legal procedures and little interest in complying with the law. In area after area, he has sought to impose his will, regardless of whether the law allows it.

That same tendency has been on display in the cruel and cavalier way his administration has dealt with the death row inmates whose sentences Joe Biden commuted in his waning days in office. Instead of following well-established procedures designed to ensure that they were treated fairly, the Justice Department seems determined to send most of them to the federal government’s draconian supermax prison at Florence, Colorado.

On February 11, Federal District Judge Timothy Kelly foiled that plan. While acknowledging that the people who sought his help had “committed some of the most horrific crimes imaginable,” Kelly insisted that the Constitution applies equally to “notorious prisoners” and “law-abiding citizens.”

He warned that the way the Trump administration wanted to treat the former death row inmates would turn the Constitution into a “sham.” The judge refused to put up with it.

Judge Kelly was right to stand up for the proposition that even the worst of the worst have rights that must be protected. That lesson is essential to preserving democracy and the rule of law in the United States.

As former Supreme Court Justice William Brennan explained more than sixty years ago, the Constitution “is a sublime oration on the dignity of man, a bold commitment by a people to the ideal of…dignity protected through law.” Brennan said that in its dealings with all Americans, the government must always “act with integrity.”

He warned that “If our free society is to endure, those who govern must recognize human dignity and accept the enforcement of constitutional limitations on their power…necessary to preserve that dignity…which is our proudest heritage.”

Brennan said this was true even for those accused and convicted of heinous crimes. “The most vile murder,” he noted, “does not, in my view, release the state from constitutional restraints on the destruction of human dignity.”

Whether in his dealings with people in the country illegally or with those on death row, President Trump has made clear the depths of his disagreement with Brennan’s point of view. That is one reason he was infuriated by Biden’s clemency.

What Biden did meant that Donald Trump could not quickly resume executing people, as he had done at the end of his first term in the Oval Office. And even before he returned to the Oval Office, he wanted to invalidate the commutations Biden had issued to thirty-seven of the forty people on the federal death row.

First, he announced that “Any and all Documents, Proclamations, Executive Orders, Memorandums, or Contracts, signed by Order of the now infamous and unauthorised ‘AUTOPEN,’[1] within the Administration of Joseph R. Biden Jr., are hereby null, void, and of no further force or effect.” The president-elect added that “Anyone receiving ‘Pardons,’ ‘Commutations,’ or any other Legal Document so signed, please be advised that said Document has been fully and completely terminated and is of no Legal effect.”

In typical Trumpian fashion, it didn’t seem to matter to him that he did not have the authority to do anything of that kind. And on Christmas Day, he posted the following: “To the 37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden. I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky ‘souls’ but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL!”

Less than a month later, the newly inaugurated president made clear that he would do everything in his power to turn the remaining years of their lives into a living hell. Among other things, he directed the Attorney General to “evaluate the places of imprisonment and conditions of confinement for each of the 37 murderers whose Federal death sentences were commuted by President Biden, and…to ensure that these offenders are imprisoned in conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”

Attorney General Bondi took her marching orders, posting the following message to X in September: “Joe Biden’s last-minute commutations of death row prisoners are a stain on our justice system and a betrayal of the families of victims…. We have begun transferring the monsters Biden commuted to Supermax prisons, where they will spend the rest of their lives in conditions that match their egregious crimes.”

At the federal supermax facility, most inmates are confined 23 hours a day in “cells with solid walls and a barred, air-lock style chamber in front of a solid metal door.… Furniture in the cell is made of poured concrete…, meals and showers are taken inside the cells and…medical consultations…are conducted remotely through teleconferencing.”

Amnesty International contends that such conditions are “cruel, inhuman…[and] degrading….” They have a “devastating impact” on the physical and mental health of the inmates held there.

And as Judge Kelly pointed out, “Because ADX Florence is meant only for ‘inmates who have demonstrated inability to function in a less restrictive environment without being a threat to others,’ there are special procedures for transferring inmates there.”

As is its wont, the Trump administration ignored those procedures, as well as the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ processes for making determinations concerning the transfer of inmates within the federal system. Twenty of the thirty-seven beneficiaries of Biden’s clemency sued, claiming that they are being denied due process.

They argued that the administration wanted to railroad them to achieve “a predetermined result,” namely, to ensure that they experience “‘brutal conditions.’” Judge Kelly granted an injunction to prevent their transfer to Florence.

He observed that the plaintiffs are “right that if their redesignations to ADX Florence were predetermined—that is fully decided at the beginning of the process rather than the end—their due process rights were violated.”

Judge Kelly said, “Plaintiffs have shown that their redesignations were predetermined… because officials with authority over BOP made it clear that they had to be sent to ADX Florence to punish them, no matter what the result of the ordinary BOP process might have yielded.”

The judge noted that “Before the change in administrations, most of the 37 commutees were not slated for referral to ADX Florence,” but after Trump took over, they were denied “a genuine opportunity to oppose their transfers to ADX Florence.”

In their haste to make the lives of the “monsters” whose lives Biden spared as miserable as possible, the president and attorney general ignored the longstanding BOP requirement of “An individualized assessment of the facility security level, health, and other needs for each prisoner,” before any reassignment was made within the federal prison system.

Judge Kelly’s decision reminds us, as Brennan put it, that even those who do horrible things do not lose “the right to have rights.” It is also a reminder that all of us have a stake in resisting the Trump administration’s refusal to respect the dignity of everyone.

And Brennan got it right when he pointed out that “If we are to be as a shining city upon a hill, it will be because of our ceaseless pursuit of the constitutional ideal of human dignity.”

Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College

[1] “Autopen” is an “electronic stamp” that presidents have long had available to sign official documents. In his controversies, Trump claimed that Biden used it more often than others because he was not ‘present’ or lacked energy. By extension of the concept, Trump would like to consider executive orders signed by Biden with Autopen, instead of “by hand”, as null and void.

https://verdict.justia.com/2026/03/02/federal-judge-stops-trump-from-making-death-row-prisoners-pay-because-they-received-clemency-from-joe-biden