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A federal judge on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from transferring 20 former death row inmates to the federal “supermax” prison in Colorado, ruling the move likely violated their Fifth Amendment due process rights.
The 35-page ruling from U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly sets up a dispute between executive authority and prisoners’ procedural rights. Under Article II’s “take care” clause, the president is charged with executing federal law, and the Bureau of Prisons — overseen by the attorney general — has broad discretion to determine where inmates serve their sentences.
It also sparked backlash from the Justice Department, which told Fox News Digital Friday that the ruling would “not be the final word” on the matter.
Kelly, a Trump appointee, said the administration could not transfer the inmates without first giving them a meaningful opportunity to challenge the move. He stressed that his ruling had no bearing on the nature of the crimes committed by the ex-death row inmates, many of whom he noted have been convicted of “some of the most horrific crimes imaginable.”
“The placement of an inmate with a life sentence at ADX Florence raises no constitutional concerns so long as the inmate is afforded adequate process,” he said.
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The Justice Department said it is weighing how to proceed. “The murderers whose death sentences Joe Biden commuted are among the most heinous criminals in the federal system,” a spokesperson for DOJ told Fox News Digital in a statement.
“The extraordinary decision by a district court judge blocking their transfer to ADX Florence is grievously wrong — and it will not be the final word. In the meantime, while the Department considers next steps, these brutal murderers will remain incarcerated on death row,” the spokesperson added.
Instead, the ruling focused narrowly on whether the inmates were given a real opportunity to contest the transfer, and Kelly said they were not. The order is a temporary blow to the Trump administration’s effort to counter sweeping clemency actions former President Joe Biden took during his final month in office, moves critics described as a political “Hail Mary” that lacked proper vetting.
“The 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 said.
Next steps in the case were not immediately clear, and the Justice Department declined to respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on whether it would seek to appeal the ruling.
The effort comes as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Trump administration have sought to reverse Biden’s sweeping clemency actions, including the commutations of 37 death row inmates, many of whom have been convicted of particularly heinous and violent crimes.
One individual was convicted of murdering a married couple camping in the Ouachita National Forest in July 2003.
Another was convicted of kidnapping, robbing and murdering a 51-year-old local bank president by tying him to a concrete block and chain hoist and tossing him off of a bridge and into a lake.
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Many had also killed prisoners while serving time, a factor that can be used in weighing whether to transfer a convicted felon to a higher-security prison.
“This Department of Justice will continue to seek accountability for the families blindsided by President Biden’s reckless commutations of 37 vicious predators,” Bondi previously told Fox News Digital in a statement.
ADX, the “Alcatraz of the Rockies,” is the only true federal “supermax” prison in the U.S., and its inmates are among the most notorious in the federal system.
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Among them are Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers; former Sinaloa Cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán, or “El Chapo”; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the co-founder of al Qaeda.
Though a commutation cannot be fully reversed, Justice Department officials told Fox News Digital, Bondi has prioritized ways to penalize these individuals in coordination with directives from Trump to ensure that the “conditions of confinement” are “consistent with the security risks those inmates present because of their egregious crimes, criminal histories, and all other relevant considerations,” according to an earlier DOJ memo.
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