The men said that, by reducing their sentences to life in prison, President Biden’s act of clemency could hurt their appeals.
Two federal prisoners whose death sentences were recently commuted by President Biden have asked a judge to block the reduction in their sentences, arguing that it could jeopardize their appeals.
The prisoners, Len Davis and Shannon W. Agofsky, said in separate court filings that they had refused to sign paperwork offered with the commutations, which would spare them from execution and reduce their sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Both men were among 37 prisoners on federal death row whose death sentences Mr. Biden commuted on Dec. 23, less than a month before Donald J. Trump returns to the Oval Office with a promise to restart federal executions.
In issuing the commutations, Mr. Biden said he was “more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level.”
But Mr. Davis and Mr. Agofsky said that they never requested a commutation and did not want one. Both men, who are prisoners at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., filed emergency petitions on Dec. 30 asking a judge to prevent their commutations from taking effect.
Mr. Agofsky, 53, was serving a life sentence for a 1989 murder when he was sentenced to death in 2004 for killing another prisoner. In his petition, he said that if he were removed from federal death row, it would make it harder for him to challenge his conviction because it would strip him of the heightened legal scrutiny that comes with federal death penalty cases.