By Michele McPhee
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A Massachusetts man wept openly in a Boston courtroom on Tuesday as a federal judge sentenced him to 28 years in federal prison for being part of a plot to behead police officers and a New York City woman, led by the Islamic State militant group (ISIS).
David Wright, 28, who prosecutors called the leader of a Boston-based ISIS cell that was communicating with the highest levels of the caliphate in Syria, sobbed as he apologized to law enforcement officers for encouraging his uncle, Usaamah Rahim, to kill police.
Rahim was shot dead by members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force on June 2, 2015, after he lunged at them with a large Marine fighting knife, acting on what prosecutors said was a directive issued by ISIS leader Junaid Hussain, who was number three on the Pentagon's kill list.
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Hussain was killed in a targeted CIA drone strike in Syria on August 24, 2015, his movements tracked partly because of his communications with the aspiring jihadi in Boston led by Wright.
U.S. District Court Justice William Young delivered an impassioned speech about the real American heroes from Massachusetts, repeating a line he delivered to shoe bomber Richard Reid at his 2003 sentencing on terrorism charges. Young told Reid then, "See that flag, Mr. Reid? That's the flag of the United States of America. That flag will fly there long after this is all forgotten. That flag stands for freedom. You know it always will."
Today Young told Wright that the "monstrous evil" he embraced will be "relegated to the dustbin of history, forgotten and reviled."
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Pamela Geller, the controversial blogger and organizer of a cartoon contest about the Muslim prophet Muhammad in Garland, Texas, was in court to deliver a victim impact statement and pleaded with the judge to send Wright to prison for life. Wright, Rahim and a third man, Nicholas Rovinski, obtained encrypted files on Geller's home and family from Hussain, prosecutors said, after ISIS called for her death.
Geller said she was targeted because she exercised her First Amendment right to speak out "against violence and intimidation," and her family has been terrified since ISIS issued the edict to kill her.
"He terrorized our lives," Geller told the court. "This will never end for me, so it should never end," for Wright, she said.
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