Wait, What? Convicted KillerFor Presidential Pardon After Biden Commutes Death Row Sentence

Council, who claims he's been tortured, hopes to receive a compassionate release from prison.

A man whose death row sentence was recently commuted to life in prison by President Joe Biden has asked for an official pardon.

Brandon Council, a Black man, received the death penalty after he was found guilty of killing two bank tellers, Donna Major and Katie Skeen, during a 2017 Conway bank raid in South Carolina. His trial lasted for three weeks. The jury found him guilty in September 2019 and a judge sentenced him to death a month later.

Biden, on his vast clemency initiative ahead of his term ending, commuted the sentences for Council and 36 others on federal death row. Now, Council hopes Biden will review his case again and allow him to walk free from a federal prison in Indiana through compassionate release.

Council filed the motion in the U.S. District Court in Florence. Compassionate release remains reserved for seriously ill or disabled inmates. However, Council claims he has endured “severe, unnecessary, and unjustifiable psychological harm” due to torture. He has also been in solitary confinement since 2019.

“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,” detailed the legal filing obtained by The Daily Mail.

Council’s experience at FCI Terre Haute “can only be accurately construed and assimilated as an act of torture.”

The families of the women killed by Council condemned his potential pardon. Furthermore, they deemed his original sentencing as “justice” and called the 38-year-old a “low life.”

Despite this, the motion emphasized how the Council’s alleged torture while incarcerated remains unconstitutional.

The document added, “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.”

Biden has yet to announce if he will issue the pardon. However, time remains sensitive. President-elect Donald Trump intends to “vigorously pursue the death penalty” in response to Biden’s initial clemency.