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By Joel B. Pollak
President Joe Biden commuted the sentence of a Josephine Gray, known as the “Black Widow” for being implicated in the murders of two of her husbands and her boyfriend, for which she fraudulently collected life insurance payouts.
Biden granted clemency to 1499 people last week in what the White House boasted was the largest such grant in one day in American history. He also granted 39 pardons. But some of the cases have generated tremendous outrage.
The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday:
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 was resentenced to the same amount of time again in 2006 following a series of appeals.
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—including threats of voodoo—to coerce them into remaining silent. “It was the witchcraft, mostly,” Lenron Goode, the brother of Gray’s third victim, told the Washington Post in 2002.
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.”
It is possible that Gray, 78, was released because the offenses for which she was convicted were “non-violent,” though they masked the most violent allegations possible.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days, available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency, now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
