A convicted killer whose federal death sentence was commuted by President Joe Biden may still face execution after he was indicted at the state level earlier this week.
On April 14, a grand jury in Catahoula Parish, Louisiana, indicted Thomas Sanders for the brutal slaying of 12-year-old Lexis Kaye Roberts a decade and a half ago.
What Sanders has already been found guilty of doing is about as about as heinous as it gets.
Over Labor Day weekend in 2010, Sanders and his 31-year-old girlfriend, Suellen Roberts, decided to leave Las Vegas, Nevada, for a three-day vacation near the Grand Canyon. Roberts brought her daughter, Lexis, along with them.
As the trio drove back to Nevada, Sanders suddenly pulled off in a remote area of Arizona along I-40. He then shot and killed Suellen Roberts and kidnapped Lexis.
With Lexis held captive in his vehicle, Sanders then hit the road, traveling for days and more than 1,000 miles until he reached some woods in Catahoula Parish. There, he shot Lexis four times and slit her throat with such force that the knife left marks on her vertebrae, a DOJ statement said.
He left her body in the woods and fled the scene, prompting a nationwide manhunt that lasted a month. Finally, in November 2010, he was spotted at a truck stop in Gulfport, Mississippi, and arrested. He later made a taped confession that he had killed both mother and daughter.
In September 2014, four full years after the incident, a federal jury deliberated for barely an hour before finding Sanders guilty of one count of kidnapping resulting in death and one count of using a firearm during a crime of violence resulting in death. Within days, the jury sentenced him to death.
‘Mr. Biden commuted the federal death sentence imposed on Mr. Sanders to a sentence of life in prison, choosing to spare the life of a convicted child-killer over the victim, Lexis Kaye Roberts.’
A little over a decade later, Biden included Sanders among 37 federal death row inmates whose sentences would be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The last-minute commutations were signed on December 23, 2024, and announced on Christmas Day.
Then-President-elect Donald Trump was in no jolly mood when he received the news.
“To the 37 most violent criminals, who killed, raped, and plundered like virtually no one before them, but were just given, incredibly, a pardon by Sleepy Joe Biden,” he posted to Truth Social. “I refuse to wish a Merry Christmas to those lucky ‘souls’ but, instead, will say, GO TO HELL!”
Frustrated that the Biden administration thwarted the jury’s decision in Sanders’ case, Catahoula Parish District Attorney Bradley Burget says he will pursue the death penalty now that a state-level grand jury has indicted Sanders for the first-degree murder of Lexis Roberts.
“In 2010, the state deferred prosecution to the federal authorities, who successfully prosecuted and achieved justice for Lexis,” Burget said in a statement.
“Yet Mr. Biden commuted the federal death sentence imposed on Mr. Sanders to a sentence of life in prison, choosing to spare the life of a convicted child-killer over the victim, Lexis Kaye Roberts.”
Louisiana is one of just a handful of states in which death row inmates may be executed via electrocution. It also recently added nitrogen hypoxia as another execution method.
For 15 years, Louisiana had suspended all executions, but in February, Gov. Jeff Landry (R) announced that his state would begin carrying out the death penalty once again. On March 18, the state put to death Jessie Hoffman Jr., who raped and murdered 28-year-old Mary “Molly” Elliott on Thanksgiving Day, 1996. Hoffman was 18 years old at the time.
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