Plane-theft defendant gets 2-year term for April flight
By The Associated Press
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Published: November 4, 2009
ST. LOUIS — A Turkish-Canadian man was sentenced Tuesday to two years in federal prison for stealing an airplane in Canada and flying over three states before landing along a southern Missouri highway on April 6.
Adam Dylan Leon might have received only 12 to 18 months. But
U.S. District Judge Charles Shaw went beyond federal sentencing guidelines in deciding punishment.
Shaw said the 31-year-old’s actions posed risks to himself and others, cost the government $230,000 to keep fighter jets in the air for seven hours tracking him, and caused the Capitol in
Madison, Wis., to be evacuated.
He also had some advice for Leon who said he had hoped to be shot down.
His attorney,
Lucille Liggett, had asked for leniency, saying her client suffered from severe depression from the death of his parents in 2002 in Turkey.
Shaw told Leon it would be worth his while to see "It’s a Wonderful Life,” the classic
Frank Capra film starring
James Stewart, about a despairing man who comes to know through an angel what life would have been like if he never had lived.
Assistant
U.S. Attorney John Sauer said the sentence was fitting for a "dangerous and harmful course of conduct,” and hopes it will deter others from such behavior.
"Law enforcement response was excellent, competent and swift,” Sauer said. "It never ended up being a serious imminent threat to anyone’s security.”
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