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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. But Kelly said the administration could not transfer the inmates without first giving them a meaningful opportunity to challenge the move.
Kelly, a Trump appointee, 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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Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks alongside President Donald Trump on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House. (Getty Images)
Instead, the ruling focused narrowly on whether the inmates were given a real opportunity to contest the transfer, which Kelly said they were not. The order is a temporary blow to the Trump administration’s effort to counter sweeping clemency actions 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 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 who were 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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Attorney General Pam Bondi. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
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 Digital in a statement.
ADX — dubbed 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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The ADX Supermax Prison in Florence, Colorado is a state of the art isolation prison for repeat and high profile felony offenders. (Photo by Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Sygma via Getty Images) (Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Sygma via Getty Images)
Among them are Ramzi Yousef, convicted in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the Boston Marathon bombers; former Sinola Cartel leader Joaquín Guzmán, or “El Chapo”; and Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, the co-founder of al-Qaeda.
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Though a commutation cannot be fully reversed, Justice Department officials told Digital, Bondi has prioritized ways to penalize these individuals, in coordination with directives from Trump, and 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.
