A former federal prosecutor in the case that sent a man to death row says it is difficult to see a “remorseless murderer” be relieved of his sentence following President Biden’s decision on Monday to commute nearly all federal inmates facing execution.
Brandon Council, of North Carolina, was sentenced to death by a federal jury on Oct. 3, 2019, after he was found guilty of killing two women who worked at a South Carolina bank during a robbery in 2017.
Council was one of the 37 convicted murderers who will now spend life in prison without parole after Biden reclassified their death sentences.
Derek Shoemake, former assistant U.S. attorney for the District of South Carolina and one of the federal prosecutors in the case against Council, told Fox News Digital it was “one of the greatest professional honors” of his life to pursue justice for victims Donna Major, 59, and Kathryn Skeen, 36, and his heart aches for their families following Biden’s decision.
Most federal death row inmates were housed at the federal prison complex in Terre Haute, Indiana. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)
Shoemake said his focus is not on the political debate surrounding Biden’s commutations, but on the “legacy of love, family, and faith” that Major and Skeen embodied.
“I pray for their families, as I so often do, and I pray for all the victims’ families impacted today,” he said.
In a White House statement announcing the commutations on Monday, Biden said he condemns the murderers and their “despicable acts,” and he grieves for the victims and families who have suffered “unimaginable and irreparable loss,” but he “cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”
President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 convicted murderers on federal death row, converting their punishments to life imprisonment. He left Tree of Life Synagogue shooter Robert Bowers (left), Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof (middle) and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (right). (Pennsylvania Department of Transportation, from left, Charleston County Sheriff’s Office, FBI via AP)
Only three inmates remain on federal death row as Biden’s presidency nears its end. They are Tree of Life Synagogue shooter Robert Bowers, Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof and Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
