LITTLE ROCK — In an agreement reached in the midst of his trial, Abdulhakim Muhammad pleaded guilty Monday to charges of capital murder and attempted capital murder in the 2009 shooting of two Army soldiers at a Little Rock recruiting station and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The agreement was a change of position for Muhammad’s attorneys, who had contended in the trial that their client should be found innocent by reason of mental disease or defect. It came after they made a formal offer Monday — the sixth day of the trial — under which their client would accept the maximum possible penalty, excluding the death sentence, for each charge.
The parents of Pvt. William Andrew Long, who was killed in the shooting, supported the agreement, as did Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, who was wounded.
Although the agreement allowed Muhammad to escape a potential death sentence, Long’s father, Daris Long, said the family didn’t want to take the chance that Muhammad could be found innocent because of a mental defect and eventually be released.
“You’re not guaranteed any particular turnout,” Long said. “We knew that going into this.”
He added that, now that the state case is resolved, he plans to press the Eastern District of Arkansas U.S. attorney’s office to pursue terrorism charges against Muhammad.
“I would like to see the feds step up to the plate,” he said.
Cherith Beck, a spokesman for U.S. Attorney Chris Thyer, didn’t return a call seeking comment on Monday.
Muhammad, 26, was accused of killing Long, 23, of Conway and wounding Ezeagwula, of Jacksonville, in a drive-by shooting on June 1, 2009, outside the Army-Navy Career Center on North Rodney Parham Road.
In addition to the capital murder and attempted capital murder charges, Muhammad faced 10 counts of unlawful discharge of a firearm from a vehicle.
Under the agreement, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Herb Wright sentenced him to life without parole on the capital-murder charge and life in prison on each of the other 11 charges. Wright also added a 15-year sentence enhancement for crimes involving the use of a firearm on each of the charges and ordered all of the sentences to run consecutively.
Muhammad had offered repeatedly to plead guilty to the charges before but was not allowed to while prosecutors were pursuing the death penalty.
Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley said Monday morning was the first time defense attorneys had presented a formal offer.
It was the only one that Jegley said he would have considered — guilty to capital murder and the maximum penalty on all the other charges. The Longs also had to approve the agreement, Jegley said.
“The Long family is merciful beyond description,” Jegley said. “They showed mercy to Muhammad, and Muhammad showed the victims no mercy whatsoever.”
Defense attorney Claiborne Ferguson of Memphis said “there had been conversations in the past” about a possible plea agreement, but “because of a multitude of different factors in this case, it just never went anywhere” before Monday.
On Monday morning, Ferguson said, he and his co-counsel, Patrick Benca of Little Rock, believed a psychiatrist’s testimony on Friday had left them in a “good position” to make an offer.
The psychiatrist, Shawn Agharkar of Atlanta, testified for the defense Friday that Muhammad suffers from a “delusional disorder” that caused him to believe he is a member of the al-Qaida terrorist organization and to shoot the soldiers.
“We just felt like ... even if the jury didn’t return a verdict of not guilty by reason of mental illness, that we were pretty solid in using it as a mitigator,” a factor a jury can consider in deciding whether to impose the death penalty, Ferguson said.
Prosecutors disagreed with Agharkar’s evaluation. They cited a report by an Arkansas State Hospital psychiatrist that found that Muhammad was not suffering from a mental disease or defect.
Chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson was questioning Agharkar in court on Friday when Wright called the attorneys into his chambers to discuss a defense objection to one of Johnson’s questions. About 40 minutes later, at about 2 p.m., Wright announced that the trial would go into recess and resume Monday morning.
Jegley said Monday that Wright felt the attorneys were “crosswise with each other,” and that Wright wanted them to “chill out and decompress a little bit” over the weekend.
On Monday morning, Jegley said, the defense attorneys presented prosecutors with the proposed plea agreement.
The Longs and Ezeagwula and his family considered the agreement over lunch before deciding to accept it.
Ezeagwula told reporters he didn’t have a problem with it.
“I’m just glad all this is over because I really was getting tired of it,” Ezeagwula said.
Muhammad’s father, Melvin Bledsoe, said he didn’t “totally agree” with his son’s plea because he believes he is mentally ill.
“I think the jury perhaps would have agreed with that” and found his son innocent by reason of mental defect, Bledsoe said. He said he wasn’t consulted about the agreement.
If Muhammad had been found innocent by reason of mental defect, he would have been placed in the custody of the State Hospital until a judge determined he could be safely released.
Muhammad showed little emotion as he stood before Wright, raised his right hand and indicated he was entering the plea voluntarily. Afterward, before his sentence was pronounced, he smiled and chuckled silently while whispering to his attorneys at the defense table.
Muhammad, a Memphis native, was born Carlos Bledsoe and converted to Islam while living in Nashville, where he attended Tennessee State University for two years.
He has said in media interviews, statements to the police and letters to the court that the shooting was part of a “jihad” against the United States in retaliation for the treatment of Muslims by members of the U.S. military.
Muhammad told police his anger against the United States began building during a 14-month trip to Yemen, when he saw news reports about Muslims being killed and raped by U.S. soldiers. He said he wanted to go to Somalia and join the militant group al-Shabaab, but ended up being jailed and then deported in January 2009 for having a fake Somali passport.
Shortly afterward, Muhammad moved to Little Rock to manage a branch of his father’s tour-bus business while he continued his preparations to carry out attacks.
Just before the Little Rock shooting, Muhammad told police he went to a recruiting station in Florence, Ky., but found it closed on a Sunday. He said he then went to Nashville, where he attempted to firebomb a house where a rabbi had lived. The Molotov cocktail that he threw at the house didn’t go off, his attorneys have said.
Muhammad told police he returned to Little Rock, planning to regroup, but then saw the two soldiers smoking outside the recruiting station and decided to shoot them.
An FBI agent interviewed Muhammad after the shooting, but no federal charges have been filed. Defense attorneys argued before the trial that the federal government should have exclusive jurisdiction over the case, but Wright rejected that argument.
Ferguson said Monday that filing federal charges could provide support for the argument that the state charges should have never been filed in the first place.
“Any federal defender would immediately move to set aside the state guilty plea,” Ferguson said.
After Muhammad entered the plea about 1 p.m., Wright thanked the jury for its service and sent the jurors home. Daris Long, his wife Janet, and his daughter, Vanessa Rice, then testified about how the death of William Andrew Long, known to friends as “Andy,” had affected their lives.
Daris Long, a former Marine, read from a letter he had written with advice for his son’s first deployment, which was to have been in South Korea.
“Your job is to stand watch on the wall separating us from those who would do us harm,” Daris Long wrote.
His son never saw the letter. Instead, Daris Long read it at his son’s funeral.
Ezeagwula’s mother, Sonja, testified in place of her son, explaining that her son was not allowed to speak in support of a sentence while wearing his military uniform.
Afterward, Ezeagwula, told reporters he still finds himself “jumping out of my sleep at night,” and that his body still aches from his injuries. He testified during the trial that shrapnel from the shooting remains lodged in his head.
“I’ll never be the same,” Ezeagwula said.
Front Section, Pages 1 on 07/26/2011