To call the crime a nightmare would be an insult to nightmares.
In August of 1996, an 18-year-old girl named Rachel Timmerman was picked up in a car by a family friend and a classmate named Mikey Gabrion. Mikey's uncle, Marvin Gabrion, was driving the three high school students to a card game that evening. But along the way, Marvin stopped the vehicle, forced his nephew and the family friend out onto the road, drove off with Rachel in the car, and later raped her.
Following the assault, Rachel reported the crime and Marvin was arrested. Two days before his trial, Timmerman left the house with her almost 1-year-old daughter Shannon. She was heading out for a date with a man she met from work.
She never came home.
To prevent her from testifying against him, Marvin Gabrion kidnapped Rachel and her daughter, drove them into the woods near Michigan's Oxford Lake. There he chained Rachel to cinder blocks, wrapped her face with duct tape, and threw her into the water alive. Rachel died from drowning. Her 11-month-old daughter Shannon was never found though Gabrion allegedly confessed to killing the baby too since "there was nowhere else to put it."
For his crimes, which include other murders, a federal jury sentenced Gabrion to death.
As a Christmas present to the family of Rachel Timmerman and others, President Joe Biden commuted Gabrion's sentence to life in prison. When the U.S. Attorney's Office called Rachel's father Tim Timmerman to tell him the news, the bereaved man was beside himself.
'I think President Biden offered a Christmas gift to the perpetrators of murder, but he offered only pain to the victims, the families of the victims,' Timmerman said, adding that the death penalty exists for people like Gabrion. 'You couldn't imagine someone that deserved it more than Mr. Gabrion. He killed at least five people. Where's the justice in just giving him a prison bed to die comfortably in?'
To answer his question, there is no justice in it.
In fact, it's the opposite of justice.
'It wasn't me that gave Gabrion the death penalty,' Tim Timmerman said. 'It was the jury, and I always think it's important to point that out, that the jury are the people who sentenced Gabrion to the death penalty. It was the consensus of the jury and not any one person.'
And one more thing:
The body of Rachel's 11-month-old daughter, Shannon Verhage, was never recovered, despite repeated searches of the lake.
'From the get-go, we offered to trade the death penalty for information regarding my granddaughter,' Tim Timmerman said. 'We offered that from the very get-go. Gabrion was unwilling to tell us what he did with Shannon, so that's always remained an open hole in our heart.'
The families of Gabrion's victims are not alone. On his way out the door, President Biden has granted clemency to some of the most monstrous killers sitting on death row.
There's Chadrick Fulks and Brandon Basham, who escaped prison and spent 17 days terrorizing innocent people. They raped and murdered 19-year-old Samantha Burns and 44-year-old Alice Donovan.
There's Ricardo Sanchez Jr. and Daniel Troya, who shot a young mom named Yessica Escobedo 11 times as she attempted to protect her two children, 4-year-old Luis Julian and 3-year-old Luis Damian. The pair killed the two boys after their mom.
In all, 36 death row murderers, including at least 3 child killers - all of them granted clemency by a cognitively impaired president who seems intent on leaving office in one final display of moral degeneracy.
While other presidents have certainly used the presidential pardon in questionable and undisciplined ways, what Biden has done is simply unprecedented. Here's a list of total pardons and commutations granted by the last 6 presidents:
There is no legitimate defense for this abuse of power. Biden's backwards administration has weakly defended the commutations of serial killers like Gabrion based on the president's long-standing "principled objection" to the death penalty. Nonsense. If that were the case, why not commute them on day one? And if it's a matter of principle, why not grant clemency to all death row inmates? Why be selective?
But beyond the death penalty debate itself, Alexander Hamilton wrote of the presidential pardon power in Federalist #74:
The criminal code of every country partakes so much of the necessary severity that without an easy access to exceptions in favor of unfortunate guilt, justice would wear a countenance too sanguinary and cruel.
In other words, as foolproof as the adversarial American legal system is, it can get it wrong sometimes. It's important to have a quick and effective means of righting those obvious wrongs. But implicit in that provision is the understanding that it will be wielded not for political favors, for retribution, or with an almost criminally negligent attitude towards justice.
To be clear, that is precisely what the current administration has done with this wanton and exploitative mismanagement of the pardon power.
May God comfort all the families left hurting and victimized again this holiday season by a president whose term cannot come to an end quickly enough.
