A US Federal Court sentenced a man with a history of mental illness to 15 years in prison for a plot to detonate a car bomb outside a California bank – the fake weapon given to him as part of an undercover FBI sting operation.  The case has some wondering how much of the crime is the defendant is actually responsible?

“I sincerely apologize.  I'm sorry for any misconduct on my part,” said 29-year old Matthew Aaron Llaneza at his sentencing hearing.  He promised to get mental health treatment in prison so that he could “live a normal life” when he’s released in 2029.

An FBI agent pretending to be a member of the Afghanistan Taliban had been in contact with Llaneza since November 2012.  The investigators provided him with a fake car bomb which he wanted to use to frame anti-government militias, start a civil war, and all the usual nonsense.

“Matthew was not a radicalized jihadist but rather a delusional, severely mentally disturbed young man,” his public defender Jerome Matthews wrote in court papers.  “He had no technical skills to speak of, he had no training or background that would have helped him to accomplish an actual bombing.”

His mother, father, step-father, and grandfather all told authorities that Llaneza was prone to delusions and inhabited a world of his own imagination.

“All the facts that I’ve seen still indicate that there’s no way he could have accomplished this on his own,” said Zahra Billoo, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the San Francisco Bay Area.  “They’re creating a crime only to solve it, and now this person is going to be supported by taxpayers in prison when he really needs mental health help.”

Llaneza got onto the FBI’s radar in 2010 after making online statements about wanting to commit violent jihad within the United States.  But the self-styled Muslim convert went on a drinking binge and threatened suicide in April 2011, and his father was forced to call in the cops to get him under control.  Police records show that Llaneza was on medication for psychosis and bipolar disorder, and he suffered from paranoia, hallucinations and heard voices in his head.  With all of this known to law enforcement, the FBI began looking more closely at his online activities. 

“It’s an extremely bizarre case, and I could see the US attorney saying, ‘I’m sorry we got into this now,’” said Robert Weisberg, a Stanford Law School criminal justice professor.  “So they might be experiencing some buyer’s remorse -- not to the point of dropping the case, but to close the books as quietly as possible.”