President Joe Biden has commuted the death sentence of a Michigan man suspected of murdering several people in the 1990’s.
In 2002, Marvin Gabrion was convicted of kidnapping and murdering 19-year-old Rachel Timmerman in 1997. Her body was found in the Huron-Manistee National Forest, weighed down by cinder blocks in Oxford Lake. An autopsy determined Timmerman had died by drowning.
Timmerman and her 11-month-old daughter Shannon disappeared two days before Gabrion was scheduled to go on trial for allegedly raping her.
Prosecutors believe Gabrion may have killed four other people, including 11-month-old Shannon Verhage.
Gabrion was tried in federal court because Timmerman’s body was found in a national forest.
President Biden is commuting the sentences of Gabrion and 36 other federal death row inmates from execution to life without the possibility of parole.
According to a press release from the White House, the president says the U-S should stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level, except in cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.
There are now just three federal inmates are still facing execution. They are Dylann Roof, who carried out the 2015 racist slayings of nine Black members of Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina; 2013 Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev; and Robert Bowers, who fatally shot 11 congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of life Synagogue in 2018, the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S history.
