“A Maryland woman dubbed the ‘Black Widow’ for murdering two husbands and a boyfriend for insurance money is now free after President Joe Biden commuted her 40-year prison sentence, undercutting the White House’s claim that Biden released only ‘non-violent’ offenders in a clemency bonanza last week,” reports the Washington Free Beacon:
Among the 1,500 federal convicts granted clemency was Josephine Virginia Gray, who was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 2002 for insurance fraud schemes connected to the murders of three men between 1974 and 1996….Gray, who collected $165,000 from the three insurance settlements, was charged with murder by Maryland state authorities but ultimately convicted in federal court in 2002 for insurance fraud for violating what’s known as the “slayers rule,” which prohibits killers from receiving inheritance and insurance proceeds from their victims’ death. Witnesses at Gray’s various trials accused her of using intimidation tactics…to coerce them into remaining silent….Gray did not face a murder trial in state court after Maryland’s state attorney said her hefty federal sentence “ensures she will die in prison.”
The COVID-19 pandemic allowed Gray—and the rest of Biden’s clemency recipients—to serve out their sentences in home confinement. Now, Biden has freed Gray altogether in what the White House called the “largest single-day grant of clemency in modern history.” Biden, in order to correct historical “injustices,” granted clemency to those “convicted of non-violent crimes who were sentenced under outdated laws, policies, and practices that left them with longer sentences than if the individuals were sentenced today,” the White House said. But Gray’s body count “puts the lie to [Biden’s claim that] these are non-violent offenders,” according to a former federal prosecutor who handled her case….Gray admitted to a friend in 2000 that she “had killed both her husbands and another gentleman.”
Biden also commuted prison sentences for a Mississippi cancer doctor who diluted chemotherapy drugs as part of a Medicare fraud scheme, an Illinois comptroller who embezzled $53 million in the biggest municipal fraud case in the nation’s history, and the 15-year sentence of Wendy Hechtman, a former journalist convicted of manufacturing and selling a drug considered more potent than fentanyl. An Omaha police detective who investigated Hechtman said her drug operation was suspected in at least six overdose deaths.
Biden also commuted the sentence of a viciously corrupt judge who was part of a scheme that sent 2,500 kids to a for-profit prison for excessive periods, in exchange for kickbacks. The kids were given excessively long sentences in order to keep the for-profit prison full. And he granted clemency to Chinese spies and the brother of Hamas’s founder.
Biden also commuted the sentences of big-time fraudsters who stole over $5 billion, whose crimes are described at this link. And he commuted the sentences of people who took bribes, such as politician Jimmy Dimora.
