Two ex-Fed Med inmates taken off death row by Biden clemency

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. - Two one-time prisoners at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, who were convicted of murdering a fellow inmate at the facility, have accepted a clemency deal by President Biden.  

In 2010, Wesley Paul Coonce Jr. and Charles Michael Hall were inmates at the “Fed Med” located off of Kansas Expressway near Sunshine Street. The center is one of the main medical facilities for the federal prison system.  

“Coonce was serving a life sentence for a kidnapping and carjacking that involved the brutal rape of a young woman, and Hall was serving a combined 194-month sentence from the District of Maine for making threatening communications against a federal judge and a federal prosecutor,” said the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs.

In June of 2010, Fed Med inmate Victor Castro-Rodriguez was found murdered in his cell after being brutally beaten. Following an investigation, Coonce and Hall were charged with the crime. 

After a trial in 2014 at the U.S. District Court in Springfield, the two were convicted and sentenced to death. They were then transferred to the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, where they have been confined to a special unit for federal death row inmates.   

On Dec. 23, 2024, President Joe Biden announced he was commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 federal inmates on death row. The offer entailed reducing the sentences from execution to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The list of inmates who were offered the deal includes Coonce and Hall.  

Coonce and Hall aren’t the only death row inmates with ties to the Ozarks who were given the chance to have their sentences commuted.  

Shannon Agofsky was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the 1989 robbery of The State Bank of Noel, and murder of bank president Dan Short by throwing him into Grand Lake.  However, he ended up on death row in 2004 after stomping a fellow inmate to death at a federal prison in Texas.

Agofsky is one of two federal inmates to not accept President Biden’s offer. Agofsky’s attorney says accepting the offer would hurt his client's chances of eventually proving his innocence.