Two federal inmates whose death sentences were previously commuted — one a former New Orleans police officer, the other responsible for a multi-state killing spree — have been moved to the nation’s most secure federal prison in Colorado, the Justice Department told Fox News Digital.
Their transfers come as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi works to tighten the Justice Department’s response to the previous administration’s sweeping clemency actions, particularly those involving violent offenders.
Justice Department officials confirmed that the pair were transferred Thursday to the U.S. Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado, commonly referred to as ADX.
They are among the 37 federal death row inmates whose sentences former President Joe Biden commuted shortly before leaving office last December. That wave of clemency sparked criticism from opponents who argued the record-setting commutations were politically motivated and not thoroughly vetted.
According to the Justice Department, eight former death row prisoners had already been sent to ADX, and the latest two transfers bring the total number moved there since mid-September to 10. Officials said they expect more transfers in the coming months and that all 37 commuted inmates are expected to be housed at ADX by early next year.
The shift in housing policy reflects Bondi’s broader effort, with support from the Trump administration, to unwind parts of the Biden-era criminal justice approach and put renewed focus on violent crime.
Although commuted sentences cannot be fully undone, Justice Department officials told Fox News Digital that Bondi has made it a priority to explore ways of imposing stricter conditions on these inmates, in line with directives from President Donald Trump. An earlier DOJ memo said the goal was to ensure that the “conditions of confinement” reflect “the security risks those inmates present because of their egregious crimes, criminal histories and all other relevant considerations.”
“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,” Bondi said in a statement to Fox News Digital.
“This Department of Justice will continue to seek accountability for the families blindsided by President Biden’s reckless commutations of 37 vicious predators,” she added.
Like the eight previously transferred inmates, the two men most recently processed into ADX were convicted of particularly brutal crimes.
In one case, a man pursued his ex-girlfriend from Roanoke, Virginia, to Charlotte, North Carolina. There, he cut the phone lines to the apartment where she was staying and used gasoline to set the building on fire. She escaped through a second-story window but suffered severe burns and was hospitalized. Two months later, after she returned to her family home in Virginia, he tracked her down again and fatally shot her on a neighborhood street, just steps away from her mother.
The second inmate is a former New Orleans police officer nicknamed “Robocop” for his imposing size and aggressive policing style. The FBI captured him on tape ordering and orchestrating the killing of a mother of three who had gone to the precinct hours earlier to file what she believed would be a confidential police brutality complaint against him, based on an incident she witnessed the previous night.
Investigators intercepted the conversation while probing a broader “protection racket” involving cocaine traffickers and New Orleans police officers who were allegedly safeguarding a drug-filled warehouse. The same officer was later identified as a key player in that scheme.
He was also found to have given false testimony in two separate murder cases, including one killing to which he has since been linked. His testimony helped exonerate four men, among them three teenagers who had been wrongfully convicted of a murder 28 years earlier.
ADX remains the country’s only true federal “supermax” facility, known for housing some of the most dangerous and high-profile inmates in the U.S. Its population includes Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; former Sinaloa Cartel boss Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a co-founder of al Qaeda.
Soon after being confirmed as attorney general, Bondi issued a memo pledging to “restore a measure of justice” for families of victims whose perpetrators benefited from clemency.
Biden’s clemency actions, particularly these commutations, drew even more pushback than those of former President Barack Obama. As Fox News previously reported, most of Obama’s clemency decisions focused on inmates who met defined criteria under his administration’s Clemency Initiative, often involving nonviolent drug offenses.
Earlier this year, Bondi met with victims’ families to hear their concerns about the late-stage commutations, the DOJ said. Some relatives said they were blindsided by the eleventh-hour decisions and received no advance notice from the Biden administration.
In February, Bondi issued a directive instructing the Bureau of Prisons to evaluate where the commuted inmates should be housed — a process that is now resulting in their transfer to the Colorado supermax.
