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.”