What would have been Minnesota's first ISIL-related federal trial turned into a study in remorse Tuesday morning, when a young Minneapolis man accepted a plea agreement, swapping his orange jail garb for a striped dress shirt and embracing a crush of loved ones outside the courthouse in Minneapolis.
Khaalid Abdulkadir, 19, was charged with tweeting death threats against a federal judge and agents late last year and faced up to 15 years in prison. Instead, he pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of attempting to intimidate a federal judge and federal law enforcement officers and received three years of probation with conditions that include GPS monitoring.
"I didn't expect it to get this big," Abdulkadir told a group of reporters after his release outside the U.S. Federal Courthouse. "I didn't expect the [indictment] to get dropped either, but with the blessing of God it got dropped."
Abdulkadir and his lawyers had shown up at the courthouse late Monday afternoon expecting a pretrial conference only to find that prosecutors were offering a plea deal.
That set off an intense round of talks among Abdulkadir, his attorneys, parents and Somali-American community leaders.
Chris Madel, one of Abdulkadir's attorneys, told U.S. District Judge Karen Schreier of South Dakota on Tuesday that he assured Abdulkadir that he thought he could win an acquittal.
"Doesn't matter: I did it," Abdulkadir replied.
On Tuesday morning, as the plea hearing unfolded, Abdulkadir's father, Adam Aded, addressed Schreier before she imposed the sentence, asking her to release him to their supervision.
