SPOKANE, Wash. — The Spokane backpack bomber filed a motion Thursday asking for a compassionate release due to the coronavirus outbreak.
White supremacist Kevin Harpham pleaded guilty to setting a backpack bomb along Spokane’s 2011 Martin Luther King Day Unity March. Parade workers spotted the backpack along the route and contacted police before the parade started. The bomb was defused by the Spokane County Sheriff’s Bomb Squad and no one was injured.
Forensics in the bomb left along the parade route led them to Harpham. DNA on the bomb and a debit card used to purchase construction supplies for the bomb were traced back to Harpham.
Hours before he was set to be sentenced, he tried to withdraw his plea because the device in the backpack did not meet the legal definition of a bomb. A judge denied his request and sentenced him to 32 years in prison followed by supervised release for the rest of his life.
According to court documents, Harpham wrote a letter to the Warden at the U.S. Penitentiary in Lompoc, California on Dec. 29, 2020 to petition for compassionate release proceedings and after 60 days there has been no response. However, after Harpham’s attorney, Nicholas Vieth, reviewed his medical records, Vieth wrote in court documents that he determined filing for a compassionate release would be “premature.”
Documents say the CARES Act expands the authority of compassionate released proceeding to home confinement.
Vieth wrote that he will not file a motion for compassionate release at this time, but could in the future.
