Among the nearly 2,500 people for whom former President Joe Biden commuted sentences before he left office were Terence Richardson and Ferrone Claiborne, who were sentenced to life in prison in 2001 even though a federal jury found them not guilty of murder.

The two men's sentences are now set to expire on July 16, according to Biden's executive grant of clemency issued on Jan. 17, days before he left office. The men have been working with former Innocence Project attorney Jarrett Adams on asserting their innocence legally since 2019. Adams told Law360 on Friday that while their sentence expires this summer, he expects they will be headed home much sooner than that. He added, however, that it appears the system is currently overloaded in processing President Donald Trump's recent pardons. 

The commutation was a huge win for Richardson and Claiborne, who have been in prison for two and a half decades but have always maintained their innocence, Adams said. But it's not the end of their fight.

"We are profoundly grateful to President Biden for recognizing the injustice in their case and taking this extraordinary step to correct it," Adams said. "While this decision allows Terence and Ferrone to finally return home to their families and begin rebuilding their lives, our fight for their complete exoneration continues. "

Richardson and Claiborne, sometimes dubbed The Waverly Two, were charged with the murder of Allen Gibson, a police officer in Waverly, Virginia, in 1998. They pled guilty when the charge was reduced to manslaughter. But in a strange bypass of double jeopardy laws, federal prosecutors indicted the two men again on conspiracy charges related to the police officer's death.

Although a federal jury found them guilty on conspiracy drug charges, it acquitted them of the murder charge. However, a sentencing judge gave the two men life in prison anyway, pointing to their state pleas as an admission of guilt.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares criticized Biden's decision the day after it was announced. According to Youngkin, the U.S. attorney general had advised the Biden White House not to commute Claiborne and Richardson's sentences, along with those of several others, because they were "violent offenders."

Richardson and Claiborne are still awaiting a decision on an actual innocence petition Richardson filed before the Virginia Appellate Court. Adams, who co-founded the wrongful conviction-focused nonprofit Life after Justice, helped Richardson file the petition in 2019, saying he had uncovered evidence pointing to another suspect for Gibson's murder that he says was not available to Richardson and Claiborne when they were first charged. He told Law360 on Friday that he is hopeful Biden's decision will send a clear message to the appeals court, which has been weighing the most recent version of Richardson's innocence petition since oral arguments in December. 

"Let me just say this, do you think the president would've commuted the sentence of two people who his office felt contributed to the death of an officer?" Adams said. 

The hope, Adams told Law360 last summer, was to have Richardson's guilty plea reversed and therefore require the federal court to take a second look at his life sentence. Now that the "biggest hurdle has been reached" and Claiborne and Richardson are coming home, Adams said the new goalpost is to clear their names. 

"They will never truly be free until they have been cleared for what happened to Officer Gibson, and they obtain their actual innocence," Adams said. "[The court of appeals] has had the petition now since December. If they didn't find something that gave them reason to take time, they would've decided already. I have to and I want to be hopeful."

--Editing by Haylee Pearl.