Agofsky and Davis Reject their Commutations

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

(Note:  This blogger freely admits to not being a supporter of the death penalty.)

President Biden commuted the sentences of thirty-seven (of forty) federal death row inmates on December 23, 2024, less than a month before he left office.  Biden changed the sentences of those thirty-seven from death by lethal injection to life in prison without the possibility of parole.  There were three others on death row whom Biden chose not to commute, each of whom had committed exceptionally heinous acts.  

One of the cases that the President decided not to commute was that of Robert Bowers, a 46-year-old right-wing extremist who shot up the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, on October 27, 2018, and killed eleven people.  Bowers had posted  many anti-semitic comments on-line prior to his attack on the synagogue.

Another case on which Biden decided not to act was that of Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old white supremacist and neo-Nazi who killed nine Black Americans and seriously wounded two others while they were in a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina.  Some were kneeling in prayer as they were being gunned down by the young man.

Both Bowers and Roof used semi-automatic weaponry in their attacks on the people in the houses of worship.

The third case on which Biden decided not to act was that of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, an American of Chechen descent who, along with his older brother, perpetrated the bomb attack on the Boston marathon in 2013, an assault that killed three and injured 280.  Dzhokhar's brother was killed by police in the aftermath of the bombing.

Clearly, the President had some misgivings about the death penalty, but even those misgivings could not be stretched to the point that they would keep the ultimate punishment from applying to the crimes of Bowers, Roof, and Tsarnaev.  Those crimes were beyond the pale and well past the limits of Biden's mercy.

The lives of thirty-seven individuals on America's federal death row were spared by President Biden, and now only three - Bowers, Roof, and Tsarnaev - remain waiting for the lethal injection that will end their lives.

Ironically, two of the thirty-seven who were spared by President Biden, are trying to reject their commutations and prefer to remain on death row.   Both are refusing to sign paperwork accepting Biden's clemency action, and each believes that if their sentence is commuted it will hurt their chances of winning appeals based on their claims of innocence.  

One of the two is Len Davis, a former New Orleans police officer who was convicted of depriving civil rights through murder by conspiring with an assassin to kill a local resident.  Davis, who is 60-years-old now, has been in prison since 1994.  His death sentence was overturned in 1999, but in 2005 a jury reinstated the same punishment.

The other federal inmate who is trying to reject his Biden commutation is Shannon Agofsky, a man whom I have known since he was a 12-year-old student at  the small Noel (Missouri) Elementary School (K-8) where I served as principal.

Shannon, who along with his older brother Joe, kidnapped Dan Short, the president of the State Bank of Noel (and a friend of mine) from his home in northwest Arkansas in 1989, took Short to his bank in southwest Missouri and robbed it, and killed the bank's president by chaining him to a weighted chair and dropping off of a bridge into the Grand Lake of the Cherokees in northeast Oklahoma.   Because the related crimes - kidnapping, bank robbery, and murder - took place in three separate states, it was handled at the federal level.  The brothers were convicted separately of those crimes, and Shannon was sentenced to life in prison.  (Joe later died in prison.)  Shannon was eighteen when that series of crimes occurred.  He is fifty-three now.

In 2001 while Shannon Agofsky (then age 30) was in a federal prison in Beaumont, Texas, he was placed in a "recreation cage" with another prisoner when a fight broke out between the two men.  Agofsky, who had been a practitioner of marshal arts even back when I had known him, kicked, beat, and stomped his opponent to death.  In 2004 he was sentenced to death in a federal court over that crime.

Len Davis and Shannon Agofsky both still harbor dreams of exoneration.  Davis may have reason to be hopeful, I don't know.  And I also have no knowledge of Agofsky's prison victim or the circumstances leading to that death (but the press reports were exceedingly gruesome).   I  did, however, know both Shannon and Joe Agofsky, as well as Dan Short and his wife and children, and I suspect that it will be highly unlikely, let alone advisable, for Shannon to ever again breath fresh air outside of a maximum security prison.

Shannon Agofsky should accept the commutation and send Joe Biden a sincere thank-you note.   Biden's mercy is much more than he deserves.