ISIS supporter convicted in plot to behead Pamela Geller
Cassandra Fairbanks
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An ISIS supporter has been sentenced to 28 years behind bars for plotting to behead conservative writer Pamela Geller over her Prophet Muhammad cartoon contest in Texas in 2015.
Wright and two other men had conspired to murder Geller after the cartoon contest where two men had shot and wounded a security guard and were both subsequently killed in a shootout with police.
Judge William G. Young told the terrorist, David Wright, 28, that he did not believe that he is a monster.
“You are not a monster, yet you embraced a monstrous evil,” Young told the tearful terrorist.
Wright had told the court that he was not an ISIS supporter, but simply pretended to in order to get attention online. He also apologized to Geller, his family, and the police.
“Nothing I can say can fix the hurt I caused,” Wright said during the sentencing hearing. “I sincerely hope that I can be given the opportunity to help others avoid the mistakes I made.”
The prosecution had been seeking a life sentence while the defense requested a 16-year sentence — claiming that he never actually intended to hurt anyone.
“I said a lot of fantastical things about what I intended, where I wanted to go and where I wanted to travel, and it was never real,” Wright said during his testimony in October. “It was fantasy.”
Fox News reports that Geller had urged the judge to sentence Wright to life in prison and said it was “impossible to overstate the devastation” he brought to her life, and said “there is no assurance that anyone can give me that he would not resume his quest to kill me and my relatives.”
While Wright was believed to have been the ringleader of the assassination plot, he had also recruited his uncle who received instructions on how to do so from Junaid Hussain, an ISIS terrorist and hacker who has since been killed in an airstrike in Syria.
The third person involved in the sinister plot was Nicholas Rovinski who pleaded guilty to conspiracy in 2016. He is currently facing 15-22 years in prison. During Wright’s trial, he told jurors that Geller “deserved to be beheaded” for insulting Muhammad.
Read a related story: Mass. man convicted of plot to behead Pamela Geller on orders from Islamic State
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