President Biden need to explain Her death sentence was commuted “to our face”, says the angry brother of a young female naval officer who was murdered by one of the “disgusting” clemency recipients.
“I want it to go back to the way it was when he was sentenced to death,” said Alex Snell, 42, of Jorge Avila-Torrez, who strangled Snell’s 20-year-old sister, Amanda Snell. . Her Arlington, Virginia barracks in July 2009.
“He should have received that sentence,” Snell told The Post about the killer — who also sexually assaulted and murdered two little girls and raped a graduate student.
In a sweeping act of clemency, Biden commuted the death sentences of 37 of the federal government’s 40 current death row inmates to life in prison without parole.
Snell said he was in “disbelief” when he learned Biden had rubbed salt into the wound of grieving families by issuing commutations two days before Christmas — and that he is “furious that justice is not being served.”
“Why does he need special treatment? He’s just going to put other people at risk,” Snell said of Avila-Torrez.
“What justification does (Biden) have for doing this? I want him to explain to us, to our face, why he chose to have mercy on them when he didn’t have mercy on other people.”
The brutality of Avila-Torrez’s crimes is evident even in his listing of some of the nation’s worst criminals.
In addition to the murder of Amanda Snell, in May 2005, Avila-Torrez sexually assaulted and stabbed two girls – Laura Hobbs, 8, and Crystal Tobias, 9 – to death in their neighborhood in a suburb north of Chicago. I was riding a bicycle.
Hobbs’ father, Jerry Hobbs, who has since died, was falsely imprisoned for five years awaiting trial before Avila-Torrez was determined to be Laura’s actual killer.
Avila-Torrez’s killing spree did not end until February 2010, when he abducted and raped a graduate student in Arlington, Virginia.
He took the victim to an isolated area and strangled her with a dupatta until she became unconscious. She was found face down in the snow and helped by a passerby, leading to Avila Torrez being arrested.
Prosecutors said that while in prison, Avila-Torrez confessed to killing Snell, who lived in the same barracks – telling another inmate that he attacked her while she was sleeping and hacking her computer. She was strangled with a wire, prosecutors said.
He then dragged her body across the room to a locker, where her body was found two days later.
Snell’s brother said he is concerned that this serial predator is harming others while behind bars.
The nine death row inmates pardoned by Biden were sentenced to death for killing fellow inmates while others were behind bars.
One of the killers pardoned by Biden killed a prison guard serving a life sentence for the murder of his wife with a hammer.
Biden also pardoned Thomas Sanders, who in 2010 kidnapped 12-year-old Lexis Roberts in Louisiana, shot her four times and slit her throat — her mother — during a road trip by Sanders near the Grand Canyon. A few days after the murder.
Biden left three of the most famous killers on death row — refusing to commute Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, Pittsburgh synagogue mass-shooter Robert Bowers and racist Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof.
Snell said he can only understand that Biden might have decided on clemency because he is “trying to appeal to some people who might see him in a better light because of it.”
Biden did not explain why he believed the death penalty to be unjust in a brief written statement explaining the death penalty.
“Make no mistake: I condemn these killers, mourn for the victims of their despicable acts, and express my grief for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss,” Biden said.
“But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. “In good conscience, I cannot step back and allow the new administration to resume actions that I had stopped.”
The White House did not respond to a Post request for comment on Monday.
(TagstoTranslate)Politics(T)US News(T)Death Penalty(T)Joe Biden(T)Murders
