Thomas Steven Sanders, a convicted child murderer whose federal death sentence was commuted by Joe Biden in December 2024 through his autopen, has been indicted for first-degree murder by a Louisiana grand jury.
Sanders was originally sentenced to death in 2014 for the 2010 kidnapping and murder of 12-year-old Lexis Roberts of Las Vegas.
He had taken Lexis and her mother, Suellen Roberts, on a trip to the Grand Canyon, during which he murdered Suellen in Arizona and then brought Lexis to Louisiana, where he killed her in Catahoula Parish.
Despite his federal conviction and death sentence, Biden commuted Sanders’ sentence to life imprisonment without parole as part of a broader move affecting 37 of the 40 inmates on federal death row.
Now, the state of Louisiana is seeking to impose its own justice.
A Catahoula Parish Grand Jury indicted Sanders for the state-level murder of Lexis Roberts.
District Attorney Bradley Burget announced that his office will seek the death penalty, emphasizing that Biden’s federal commutation does not affect state prosecution, KALB reported.
“Biden’s action to commute the federal death penalty will have no effect on the state prosecution of Sanders,” Burget stated per The Democrat.
Thomas Steven Sanders is the third individual granted clemency to end up back behind bars.
The Gateway Pundit reported that Dequan Willard, a 30-year-old Texas man, was granted clemency by President Joe Biden on January 17 as part of a sweeping mass release that included 2,490 federal inmates.
But it didn’t take long for the so-called “nonviolent offender” to show his true colors.
Just seven days later, Willard was arrested again for allegedly violating the conditions of his supervised release.
Another recipient of Biden’s mass clemency, a convicted drug dealer, is back behind bars—this time facing serious drug and firearms charges.
Willie Frank Peterson, 52, was originally convicted of conspiracy to distribute cocaine in 2023 and sentenced to over six years in prison.
Now, less than two months after his release, Peterson was arrested in Dothan, Alabama, and charged with two counts of unlawful possession of a controlled substance, one count of possession of marijuana, possession of drug paraphernalia, and three firearms-related offenses.
