Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Pool
Topics: Death Row, US News, California
Joe Yates
Former president Joe Biden signed off on commuting 37 federal inmates who were sentenced to death before exiting his post, but one inmate refused to sign on the dotted line.
Commutation was offered to Iouri Mikhel who was placed on death row in 2007 alongside his criminal partner Jurijus Kadamovas, after he was convicted of kidnapping people in California for ransom before disposing of their bodies in a reservoir.
Between 2001 and 2002, the pair killed five people and dumped their corpses in a pool of water outside Yosemite National Park - despite receiving more than $1 million in ransom.
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The 59-year-old, who was born in Soviet Russia, had demanded more than $5.5 million from the families of his victims.
Over the period of four months, from October 2001 until January 2002, Mikhel and Kadamovas kidnapped and killed five people - including a pregnant woman.
The victims of the serial killers were 58-year-old Meyer Muscatel, 39-year-old Rita Pekler, 35-year-old Alexander Umansky, 29-year-old Nick Kharabadze, and 37-year-old George Safiev.
Three of their victims were suffocated to death, while the other two were strangled, before they were all dumped in New Melones Lake.
Mikhel told a judge that he 'does not want commutation' as he thinks it would harm any appeal he may make.
The serial killer's petition suggested that his conviction and sentence was as a result of the 'unconstitutional way in which the charges were filed'.
It read in part: "Numerous violations of the established procedural statutes during the trial as well as multiple violations of defendants' rights—the inept work of the defense team were the very definition of inefficient assistance of counsel for one."
It comes as two death row inmates who had the chance to have their death sentences commuted by Biden decided not to sign the paperwork too.
Shannon Agofsky and Len Davis are among a group of 37 federal inmates whose death sentences were commuted by the former president just before Christmas, when he announced that the prisoners would have their sentences reclassified to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
Biden's decision came as part of his belief that America must 'stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder'.
But the pair also refused to sign the docs.