Shortly before he left office, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers. Those convicts, all on death row, were now facing life behind bars.
Two of those convicts, Norris Holder and Billie Allen, killed bank guard and former police officer Richard Heflin in a 1997 bank robbery. Other family members of murder victims were outraged and hurt by Biden's move.
Alex Snell, the brother of Amanda Snell, was one of those people. Amanda, 20, was strangled by Jorge Avila-Torrez in 2009. "I’d rather see it go back to the way it was, where he was sentenced to death," Snell said. "He should have gotten that penalty."
President Biden said he commuted the sentences (save for three convicted of terrorism or hate crimes) because he had a change of heart on the death penalty, and the Wall Street Journal says he found it "needlessly cruel, as well as impossible to administer fairly."
It seems the Wall Street Journal believes those commutations somehow absolve the convicted murderers from facing consequences for their actions, and they're appalled that President Trump hasn't made their lives behind bars easier.
Among the last actions by former President Biden before leaving the Oval Office was commuting the death sentences of 37 convicted murderers.
— The Wall Street Journal (@WSJ) October 21, 2025
Hours after President Trump took over, he ordered their life sentences be made, in effect, a living hell. https://t.co/Gu2pNrHzJt pic.twitter.com/ypj9w5iG3C
Among the last actions by former President Joe Biden before leaving the Oval Office was commuting the death sentences of 37 convicted murderers.
Hours after President Trump took over, he ordered the life sentences of these men be made, in effect, a living hell.
With that guidance, officials canceled plans to transfer most of the inmates to mainline prisons. Instead, Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general at the time, ordered all but a handful requiring specialized medical treatment be housed in the U.S. Penitentiary at Florence, Colo., the harshest institution in the federal system.
Inmates at the Colorado prison—intended for the nation’s most violent—typically spend 23 hours a day alone in their cells. At a meeting in May with Attorney General Pam Bondi for families of loved ones killed by the 37 convicts, some officials said they wished conditions at the prison, known as ADX, were even worse.
Aaron Reitz, a former assistant attorney general, held a roundtable with victims' families. "If you’re not going to be killed lawfully at the hands of the state, well, your prison sentence is going to be hard as hell," Reitz said in an interview.
There is little sympathy for these convicts outside of the Wall Street Journal editorial room.
Holy sh*t the WSJ actually tries to make President Trump the bad guy for sending murderers including cop and child killers to a supermax prison after Biden ordered them released from Death Row.
— Julie Kelly 🇺🇸 (@julie_kelly2) October 21, 2025
This happens to be the same prison where two defendants in Whitmer fednapping hoax… https://t.co/cMW4DG7okK
"This happens to be the same prison where two defendants in Whitmer fednapping hoax are incarcerated," Kelly added.
A living hell? Are you referencing the murder victims' families? https://t.co/r9orq9Pr4g
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) October 22, 2025
They are not.
Once again, the Left proves they only believe in justice and kindness for criminals and not their victims.
Meanwhile, Justin Heflin, son of the aforementioned victim Richard Heflin summed up how most people feel about the Trump administration's decision, “It’s a harsher prison, so they would suffer more,"
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