A British Columbia man who led a “military-style” bank robbery and later tried to rent somebody to homicide a U.S. federal prosecutor has gained a reduced jail sentence due his age on the time of the crimes and his behaviour whereas incarcerated, in keeping with the U.S. lawyer’s workplace in Seattle.
Luke Elliott Sommer, 36, efficiently petitioned a U.S. district decide Wednesday to cut back his 43-year sentence to 31 years, regardless of the decide characterizing his crimes as “among the most excessive, violent and harmful actions to come back earlier than this courtroom.”
The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Washington described Sommer in a information launch because the mastermind of an August 2006 robbery at a Bank of America department in Tacoma, Wash.
Five males, together with Sommer, carried out the robbery. Two had been armed with absolutely computerized AK-47 rifles, whereas Sommer and one other carried semi-automatic handguns. All wore physique armour and carried a whole bunch of rounds of ammunition within the occasion of a shootout with police, in keeping with the lawyer’s workplace.
Sommer, then 20 years previous, deliberate to make use of the proceeds of the robbery to begin a legal gang in B.C. that will rival the Hell’s Angels.
‘I WILL NEVER BE THE SAME’
A twin citizen of Canada and the U.S., Sommer is a former U.S. Army Ranger who served excursions in Iraq and Afghanistan. He plotted the robbery with fellow British Columbians Tigra Robertson and Nathan Dunmall, and fellow Army Rangers Chad Palmer and Alex Blum.
“If the police arrived, Luke Sommer deliberate to go to battle,” the proseuctor stated on the sentencing of one among his co-defendants. “The robbers had been armed for fight.”
The males made off with greater than US$50,000 however had been later tracked down when their automobile was traced to their navy barracks.
Three victims of the robbery advised a Seattle courtroom Wednesday that they suffered post-traumatic stress and anxiousness within the wake of the crime. The former department supervisor described the shock of seeing the crimson dot of Sommer’s laser web site pointed at her bank teller workers.
“The employees was by no means the identical, I’ll by no means be the identical,” the supervisor stated.
Sommer was convicted and sentenced in 2008 for armed bank robbery, conspiracy to commit armed bank robbery, brandishing a firearm throughout a violent crime, and possession of a hand grenade.
Barely a month later, he supplied an FBI informant US$20,000 to homicide the assistant U.S. lawyer who convicted him, telling the would-be hitman he needed the dying to seem as a “homicide, not an accident,” in keeping with the lawyer’s workplace.
The try to rent a hitman, in addition to a knife assault on one among his co-defendants whereas incarcerated, would earn Sommer an extra 20-year sentence.
On Wednesday, U.S. Attorney Nick Brown stated Sommer expressed regret for his crimes and advised the courtroom and his victims that years of incarceration had modified him.
“He claims to be dedicated to engaged on his reform and doing what is true,” Brown stated within the launch. “He now has greater than a decade to show that dedication whereas he stays incarcerated.”
In lowering Sommer’s sentence, the decide famous that “punishment shouldn’t be vengeance or retaliation,” including he had arrived at his determination after contemplating letters from U.S. Bureau of Prisons employees who wrote that Sommer had “labored onerous to do the precise factor whereas incarcerated.”
Fellow Canadians Dunmall, 34, and Robertson, 36, had been launched from U.S. jail in 2012 and 2015, respectively.