Earlier this month, U.S District Judge Timothy J. Kelly, nominated to the federal court by President Trump in 2017, temporarily blocked the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Prisons from transferring 37 (of the 40) men imprisoned on federal death row at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, to the maximum security prison known as ADX in Florence, Colorado.
After President Biden commuted the death sentences of the 37 men before he left office in December 2024, BOP began planning to relocate them to other prisons in the system. But, in an Executive Order issued on the day he took office in January 2025, Trump, “who had lashed out against the commutations when they happened,” Kelly noted, had directed DOJ to transfer the men to prisons whose “conditions [are] consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes and the threats they pose.”
“Almost immediately, counsel for all plaintiffs were informed that they would be referred to ADX Florence,” Judge Kelly stated in his 35-page ruling, https://files.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/ADX-Injuction-opinion.pdf and added that a BOP attorney had told the plaintiffs’ lawyers that DOJ had told them “to send them all to ADX regardless of individualized assessments.” That means “it is likely their redesignations were determined before their process even began, and that—despite their hearings and appeals—they had no meaningful opportunity to challenge them,” Judge Kelly said. Furthermore, “because officials with authority over BOP made it clear
that they had to be sent to ADX Florence to punish them, no matter what result the ordinary BOP process might have yielded,” plaintiffs “have shown a likelihood of success on their claim that their transfers to ADX Florence violate the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause” and, as a result, they will continue to serve their life sentences at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. (One of the 37 men has been transferred to Arizona, where he will be prosecuted under state law, and possibly sentenced to death a second time.)
“The Court does not reach this conclusion without careful consideration. But plaintiffs have proffered an unusual array of evidence in support of their claim,” Judge Kelly stated.