Two days before Christmas last year, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. commuted the sentences of nearly all prisoners on federal death row, sparing the lives of 37 men. Among them was Brandon Council, who had been convicted of killing Donna Major, 59, and her co-worker during a bank robbery in Conway, S.C., in 2017. . .


President Trump, who criticized Mr. Biden’s decision last year and told the commuted inmates to “go to hell,” issued an executive order in January encouraging state and local prosecutors to seek new charges against those inmates, which could subject them to new death sentences. The Supreme Court ruled in 2019 that defendants could be prosecuted for the same offenses in both federal and state court.

Now, prosecutors in South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida have either filed new state charges or promised to do so against at least four of the men, including Mr. Council, now 40. Their legal predicament has no modern precedent, experts said, and lawyers who oppose the death penalty say they expect a lengthy fight in the courts.

Most of the 37 men have not been newly charged in the states where their crimes occurred, and it is unlikely that they will be, either because those states don’t carry out executions or because the cases are too old.