While openly advocating for the murder of millions of innocent unborn children for convenience, President Joe Biden recently commuted the sentence of 37 death row inmates who’d been sentenced to die by the federal government - some of them for crimes so heinous, they’re difficult to read.
Here are just a few of the most violent, depraved people Biden took off death row and commuted to life in prison.
Jorge Avila-Torrez.
Avila-Torrez is a former Marine who was convicted in the 2009 slaying of 20-year-old Navy Petty Officer 2nd Class Amanda Jean Snell, who he strangled to death in the barracks at Joint Base Myer–Henderson Hall. He was arrested the following year after kidnapping another woman, driving her to a secluded area before raping and strangling her. She survived and reported the incident to police, who eventually arrested Avila-Torrez. He was later connected to the unsolved murder of eight-year-old Laura Hobbs and nine-year-old Krystal Tobias, two little girls who went missing while riding their bikes in May of 2005. Their bodies were later found, having been raped before being stabbed in the head and neck. Hobbs’ father was wrongly convicted and spent five years in prison for the murder before Avila-Torrez was eventually charged.
Thomas Steven Sanders.
Sanders, of Las Vegas, was scheduled to die by lethal injection, nitrogen hypoxia or electrocution for the 2010 kidnapping and murder of a 12-year-old Lexis Roberts and her mother, Suellen. The mother and daughter were on a trip to the Grand Canyon when they were abducted by Sanders, who shot Suellen in the head next to the interstate before taking off with Lexis across multiple states. He eventually murdered her by shooting her in the head and slitting her throat before dumping her body in the woods, where she was eventually found by a hunter.
Iouri Mikhel and Jurijus Kadamovas.
Both soviet-born immigrants, Mikhel and Kadamovas were convicted of murdering five people in a kidnapping-for-ransom scheme out of California, nabbing the individuals - four men and one woman, ranging in age from late 20s to mid-50s - separately over the course of four months and demanding millions in ransom from their families. They ultimately collected more than $1 million in payments. They strangled their victims to death anyway, dumping their bodies in a Northern California reservoir.
Brandon Leon Basham and Chadrick Evan Fulks.
Prison escapees who’d met while incarcerated at a Kentucky jail together for unrelated crimes, Basham and Fulks were convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and slaying of 44-year-old Alice Donovan, who they carjacked at a Walmart, and a 19-year-old college student named Samantha Burns, who they kidnapped while she was leaving her job at a JCPenneys. Both women were abducted during the pair’s 17-day crime spree after breaking out of prison.
Donovan’s remains weren’t found until 2009. As for Burns, Basham later confessed that he had Fulks had dumped her body in a river after raping and murdering her. The teen’s body has never been recovered.
Ricardo Sanchez and Daniel Troya.
Sanchez and Troya, both connected to a drug cartel, were both convicted and sentenced to die for the 2006 killing of a husband, his wife, and their two preschool-age children. The pair shot Luis Escobedo, his wife Yessica Guerrero Escobedo, and their two sons, 4-year-old Luis Julian and 3-year-old Luis Damian, in their car along the Turnpike in St. Lucie County, Florida, killing both boys as they cowered in their mother’s arms.
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Despite the horrific nature of many of the crimes - more than a few of which included inmates sentenced for killing police officers and innocent victims during the course of a robbery or other crime - Biden maintained his decision to take the offenders off death row was "guided by [his conscience]."
“Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden's statement said. “But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, vice president, and now president, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
Only three federal death row inmates remain, including Dylann Roof, convicted in the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who shot and killed 11 members of the Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018.