Attorneys for the person who opened hearth on a crowded New York subway practice, wounding 10 individuals and sparking an intense citywide manhunt, are demanding he be sentenced to 18 years in jail.
Frank James, now 64, “suffers from lifelong paranoid schizophrenia,” his federal defenders wrote in a sentencing memorandum this week.
James pleaded responsible in January to 11 federal fees, largely of committing a terrorist assault in opposition to a mass transit system, in reference to the April 2022 capturing.
Prosecutors are searching for as much as a life sentence — 10 life sentences to be served concurrently, or on the similar time — plus 10 years, in response to courtroom paperwork they filed Wednesday.
“The assault was meticulously deliberate over months and years, opposite to the defendant’s arguments in his sentencing movement,” prosecutors wrote. “The defendant didn’t explode, and abruptly determined to level his firearm on the harmless victims driving the subway practice, as he alleges in his sentencing memorandum.”
James is scheduled to be sentenced on September 28.
“Mr. James just isn’t evil. He’s very sick,” James’s legal professionals say. They mentioned 18 years was past James’s life expectancy and requested the choose for mercy. They wrote that the capturing was “the tragic manifestation of the inner devaluation of human life by Frank James.”
“Many years of indignity and discrimination, actual and perceived, have decreased him to abject indifference. He not values life or loss of life, whether or not for himself or for others,” his legal professionals mentioned.
James, who made a sequence of weird YouTube movies, opened hearth on a Manhattan-bound N subway practice because it arrived at Brooklyn Station round 8:30 a.m. on April 12, 2022.
The person, dressed as a upkeep employee, detonated a smoke grenade and opened hearth on individuals randomly with a Glock 17 semi-automatic pistol outfitted with an prolonged journal, prosecutors mentioned.
James fired 32 photographs earlier than the gun jammed.
He then ran away, threw the upkeep employee’s jacket and different garments within the trash, and mingled with different terrified passengers as they boarded one other practice, prosecutors wrote.
A day after the assault, he referred to as the police tip line and surrendered.