Inmates, whose death sentences were commuted by President Biden, were denied a preliminary injunction to prevent them from being transferred to a supermax prison under an executive order issued by President Trump.
The plaintiffs didn’t exhaust their administrative remedies as required by the Prison Litigation Reform Act,
Days before he left office, Biden changed the sentences of 37 death-row inmates to life without parole. The day Trump took office, he issued an order requiring those inmates to be in prison “conditions consistent with the monstrosity of their crimes” and their security risks. Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a memorandum to implement the directive.
Twenty-one of the 37 inmates whose sentences were commuted alleged that Bondi, pursuant to Trump’s request, “unlawfully hijacked the normal process that the Bureau of Prisons uses to decide where to place inmates,” Kelly said. They alleged that before the “sham process,” they were slated to go to normal prisons, not the most secure and restrictive federal prison in the United States.
Preliminary relief is currently unavailable because the plaintiffs can’t show that they will succeed on the merits of their claim or have exhausted available administrative remedies, Kelly said. “The Bureau of Prisons offers an administrative process for challenging final designations to ADX, and Plaintiffs have not completed—or, to the Court’s knowledge, even started—that process,” he said.
The exhaustion requirement is mandatory and applies even if the inmate thinks that it would be futile, Kelly said.
The plaintiffs said that there was nothing to exhaust. Under the Trump order and Bondi memo, the BOP lacked discretion to send them anyplace but ADX, the plaintiffs said. The grievance process for prison designations “may not provide a way for Plaintiffs to invalidate the Bondi Memo or the executive order,” but that doesn’t mean that BOP lacked authority to provide them any relief, Kelly said.
Though the plaintiffs challenged the process resulting from the memo and order, “that process is still one for designating inmates to ADX,” Kelly said. A “grievance procedure that offers relief against that ultimate designation also offers ‘some relief for’ the alleged process problems,” he said.
The plaintiffs’ assertion that a valid process isn’t available to them confuses availability with futility, Kelly said.
The administrative remedy is also available even though the plaintiffs could be transferred before they complete the appeal process, Kelly said. The government has said that it won’t move them before the process is complete and they haven’t provided a non-speculative reason for finding otherwise, he said.
Hecker Fink LLP, the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and Sara L. Norman of San Francisco represent the plaintiffs. The US Department of Justice represents the administration.
The case is Taylor v. Trump, 2025 BL 181337, D.D.C., No. 25-1161 (TJK), 5/27/25.
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