Inmate stuck on U.S. death row despite vacated death sentence: AP

NEW YORK, April 17 (Xinhua) -- There is chronic bureaucracy in the U.S. prisons system and the difficulties in getting anyone off death row, sometimes with additional reluctance to act in death row cases given the nature of inmates' crimes, reported The Associated Press (AP) on Sunday.

The Justice Department executed 13 U.S. death row inmates, in the last months of Donald Trump's presidency. While Joe Biden's Justice Department paused the executions and reversed decisions to seek death sentences in some cases, it continues to seek them in others, according to the report.

A case in point, when Bureau of Prisons Director Colette Peters visited the penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, this past week, she stopped by the federal death row where Bruce Webster is in a solitary, 12-by-7 foot cell, 23 hours a day.

"Webster's not supposed to be there. A federal judge in Indiana ruled in 2019 that the 49-year-old has an IQ in the range of severe intellectual disability and so cannot be put to death," said the report.

In Webster's case, he and three accomplices kidnapped a sister of a rival drug trafficker in 1994, kicking their way into an Arlington, Texas, apartment as Lisa Rene frantically dialed 911. They raped her over two days, then stripped her, bludgeoned her with a shovel and buried her alive, according to the report.

The Biden administration should see moving Webster as an uncontroversial if modest step toward fulfilling the president's campaign pledge to stop federal executions for good, noted the report.