Double Murderer Whom Biden Sprung from Death Row Is Now Demanding an Even Bigger Gift
One of President Joe Biden’s last legal obscenities just got worse.
A double murderer, whose death sentence was commuted to life in prison, is now asking a court to let him go free entirely on the grounds that the solitary confinement he’s experienced for the past five years amounts to legally sanctioned “torture.”
Maybe his victims’ families might have something to say about what that word means.
According to WBTW in Florence, South Carolina, convicted killer Brandon Council has filed a motion in federal court to get out of jail free after Biden spared him the death penalty along with 36 other inmates on federal death row.
Since November 2019, the 38-year-old been held in solitary at Indiana’s Federal Correctional Institution, Terre Haute, according to the New York Post.
Now, it’s not enough that he’s escaped the executioner. He wants to be freed on “compassionate release” — a status normally reserved for “seriously ill or disabled patients who are incarcerated,” WBTW reported.
“The petitioner’s subjection to torture is the subsequent result of the petitioner’s sentence to death, however, the additional punishment of solitary confinement which is the cause of the psychological harm is in no manner statutorily authorized, mandated, or required by the petitioner’s sentence to death,” Council declared in a motion in the U.S. District Court of Florence, WBTW reported.
“Within the jurisdiction of the United States it is both illegal and unconstitutional to inflict or subject any person to torture as a punitive consequence for a crime a party has been duly convicted of.”
Well, there’s no denying that solitary confinement can’t be a pleasant experience, but “torture” is a relative term.
And “torture” could easily describe what Council inflicted on his victims’ families since the 2017 bank robbery in Conway, South Carolina, where he killed bank employees Donna Major and Katie Skeen.
The women’s deaths at Council’s hands were recorded on bank surveillance cameras, according to the U.K.’s Daily Mail.
“Everyone should see the video of what he did to them,” Skeen’s mother, Betty Davis, told the Daily Mail.
“Everyone should see his face as he killed them. There was no emotion. There is no place for sympathy for that man.”
NEW: Murderer who had his death sentence commuted by President Biden is now demanding he be released from prison.
Brandon Council was sentenced to death after killing two bank employees in 2017.
Council says *he* is the victim of “psychological harm” and is demanding a… pic.twitter.com/8zKCo8sply
— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) December 30, 2024
Of course, in the Democratic Party that Biden still leads — at least nominally — sympathy only goes to criminals, not the victims of crime.
That’s how millions of illegal immigrants have been allowed to invade the United States since Biden’s inauguration in 2021. It’s how American cities from Aurora, Colorado, to New York City have become infested with international criminal enterprises and garden-variety thuggery.
It’s how innocent victims like Laken Riley end up dead.
And for the president himself, a man sworn to uphold the laws of the United States, the legal system is a personal weapon. It’s a sword to be wielded against his enemies, like now-President-elect Donald Trump or Americans who happen to hold pro-life views, and sheathed when it comes to loved ones, like the crooked son he pardoned.
Biden’s 11th-hour pardons and commutations were a mockery of the justice system that lines up perfectly with how he’s spent the past four years. He emptied death row in the federal prison system, leaving only three men still facing execution:
Dylann Roof, who massacred nine black church members in South Carolina in 2015; Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber who killed three in 2013; Robert Bowers, who killed 11 during a 2018 attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue.
The more observant, or more cynical, reader will note the ecumenical nature of the monsters Biden declined to spare.
Council was lucky. He isn’t a white supremacist who killed black church congregants, a Muslim who bombed an iconic American tradition, or a raging anti-Semite who killed Jews. He’s just a run-of-the-mill black murderer who killed two white women during the commission of a federal felony.
So, naturally he gets a pass from the Grim Reaper, for now. But he wants more — and, given the way Biden has treated the law throughout his presidency, and is treating it on his way out the door, why shouldn’t Council feels he at least has a chance to get out if he pushes his luck a little further?
There’s no doubt the death penalty is a controversial issue in the country, but there’s also no doubt that the Founders considered it a part of any justice system. The Fifth Amendment states that no person shall “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
That pretty clearly shows the deprivation of life was understood as part of doing business in the Founding era.
The killers whose sentences Biden commuted had been afforded “due process of law.” And due process decided they deserved death.
And in Council’s case, the victims’ families agreed.
“He deserved the sentence he got,” Davis told the Daily Mail. “My daughter had no choice over her fate. She didn’t get to choose what he did to her.”
“Him getting the death sentence meant everything to us. It meant justice for Katie and Donna.”
But thanks to Biden’s actions, that’s going to be justice denied.
That’s bad enough. What’s worse is, now Council wants to go free.
Maybe Biden will help there, too.
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