By Allan Lengel
ticklethewire.com
Former U.S. Army Ranger Luke Sommer should have done the math before he committed the crime.
A federal judge in Seattle handed Sommer a 20-year sentence on Monday for offering an undercover FBI task force officer up to $20,000 in a prison visitors’ area to kill the assistant U.S. Attorney in his bank robbery case. He was also fined $25,000.
Sommer’s offer to pay the agent came just months after he was sentenced to 24 years for bank robbery. Now he’ll serve 44 years. Authorities said the additional 20-year-sentence was not only for the attempted murder but for also using a knife in prison to attack a co-defendant in his bank robbery case.
According to the plea agreement, on two occasions in March 2009, Sommer met in a visitors’ area at the Federal Detention Center SeaTac in the state of Washington with the undercover the FBI task force officer and offered $15,000 to $20,000 to kill the prosecutor.
His plea agreement shows that authorities were alerted of his interest in getting a hitman from an inmate at the Federal Detention Center SeaTac in January 2009, about a month after he was sentenced.
Court documents show he told the undercover officer he wanted news reports to reflect that the death was “murder not an accident.”
“There is no doubt that the defendant is a very dangerous man and needs to be locked up to protect society,” Assistant United States Attorney Gregory A. Gruber said in a statement. “This was an assault not just on the individual victims, but on the heart of the criminal justice system.”
Authorities say that Sommer had robbed a bank in 2006 and planned to use the money to start a crime family to rival the Hell’s Angels in British Columbia.
