President Joe Biden on Monday morning commuted the sentences of 37 federal inmates on death row, including a Michigan man who killed a 19-year-old woman who had accused him of rape in 1997.
Marvin Charles Gabrion II, 71, was convicted of the murder of Rachel Timmerman and sentenced to death in 2002, making him the only Michigander on federal death row. Michigan’s state constitution prohibits the death penalty; the only other execution of a Michigan resident since it became a state was carried out by the federal government in 1938, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington DC
In 1847, Michigan became the first English-speaking government to ban the death penalty.
Gabrion was charged and convicted by the federal government after Timmerman’s body was found in Oxford Lake, in Manistee National Forest in Newaygo County.
Carpenter, who was discovered by fishermen with duct tape wrapped around her face, her hands in handcuffs and her body weighed down by cinder blocks, disappeared days before Gabrion was to stand trial on the rape charge. Her 18-month-old daughter, Shannon, also disappeared and was never found. An appeals court that reconsidered Gabrion’s conviction and sentence found the evidence against him “overwhelming.”
Gabrion is being held at a federal facility in Missouri.
Biden, who imposed a moratorium on the federal death penalty when he took office in 2021, commuted the sentences of Gabrion and the other inmates sentenced to execution to life in prison. Biden will leave office on January 20 when former President Donald Trump is inaugurated.
Biden has said the US should only use the death penalty at the federal level in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass killings. During his first term, Trump’s Justice Department resumed the use of federal executions after nearly two decades, and he indicated during this year’s campaign that he would reinstate and possibly expand the use of the death penalty once he was re-elected.
This month, Biden commuted the sentences of about 1,500 nonviolent federal prisoners, including about three dozen initially processed in Michigan, allowing them to be released early.
Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com.
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Biden commutes death penalty of Michigan’s Marvin Gabrion
