Nearly four years after an appeals court threw out his first sentence for being too lenient, a suburban Chicago man was resentenced Friday to 27 years in prison for plotting to detonate a car bomb outside a bar in downtown Chicago in what turned out to be an FBI terrorism sting.
U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly’s sentence adds more than a decade to Adel Daoud’s original 16-year term, and means he’ll likely not be eligible for release until 2035.
It also puts an end — barring further appeals — to a high-profile terrorism case that has lingered at the Dirksen Courthouse since September 2012, when the then-17-year-old Daoud was arrested while trying to detonate what he thought was a bomb outside the Cactus Bar & Grill, intending to kill scores of people in the name of jihad.
In addition to terrorism charges stemming from the bomb plot, Daoud pleaded guilty to separate indictments accusing him of soliciting the murder of the undercover FBI agent at the center of the sting operation and attacking a fellow inmate with a jailhouse shank while awaiting trial in 2015. It was an unusual deal known as an Alford plea, where the defendant admits guilt to the specific charge but not to the alleged underlying conduct.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman sentenced Daoud in 2019 to 16 years in prison, far less then the 40 years requested by prosecutors. But the the 7th Circuit U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed that ruling a year later, saying the judge paid only “lip service” to the seriousness of the crime and overplayed the defendant’s immaturity at the time the FBI caught him in the sting.
Daoud, now 30, has been held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago since the case was sent back to Kennelly for resentencing.
In addition to the 27-year sentence, Kennelly ordered him to serve the rest of his life on supervised release once his time in prison is done.
Daoud, of Hillside, had just turned 17 when he came under FBI scrutiny in 2011 while exchanging messages online about his hatred of the U.S. government and his desire to die a martyr. FBI analysts posing as terrorists eventually got Daoud to meet with an undercover agent, who was purportedly their “cousin” interested in waging jihad.
Over several months, Daoud and the agent met a few times in the Chicago area to discuss potential targets for an attack, including movie theaters, a suburban mall and military recruiting centers, prosecutors alleged. Daoud’s handwritten notes he brought to one meeting made reference to a “big bomb.”
In one meeting in Villa Park in August 2012, Daoud allegedly told the agent he wanted to maximize the carnage so he would feel like he “accomplished something.”
“If it’s only like five, 10 people, I’m not gonna feel that good,” Daoud said in a recording that was played at his sentencing hearing. “I wanted something that’s … massive. I want something that’s gonna make it in the news like tonight.”
Daoud was arrested in an alley across from the Cactus Bar & Grill on Sept. 14, 2012, after he twice pressed the detonator to what he thought was a 1,000-pound car bomb he’d parked outside the crowded pub.
Two months after his arrest, Daoud was being held at the Kankakee County Jail when he offered to pay $20,000 to his cellmate to have fellow street gang members track down and murder the agent who’d deceived him, saying that “all spies must die,” according to prosecutors.
In May 2015, Daoud attacked a fellow inmate at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, using a toothbrush he’d fashioned into a shank to slash the victim while he slept in his cell, prosecutors said. Daoud was allegedly angry the inmate had previously drawn a picture of the Prophet Muhammad, which Daoud considered an insult to his religion.
In early hearings on the charges, Daoud was prone to frequent outbursts in court and once accused Coleman of being a reptilian overlord. The judge eventually found Daoud mentally unfit for trial and sent him to a federal facility for treatment. A year later, he was found to be rehabilitated.
In issuing her sentence in May 2019, Coleman chided both sides for infusing their arguments through the years with “hyperbole and hysteria” and said it was clear in many of the recorded conversations that Daoud was an “immature young man” who was easily egged on by the undercover agent.
“(Daoud) continued to do what teenage boys do, which is to talk big,” Coleman said. “He clearly stated he did not know how to build a bomb.”
But the 7th Circuit said in its opinion that Coleman had given “short shrift” to Daoud’s intentions. Not only was Daoud undeterred when the FBI offered him opportunities to call off the bombing, “the possibility of mass casualties excited and motivated (him),” the opinion stated.
In its 26-page opinion, the appellate court wrote Coleman “sterilized Daoud’s offense conduct in ways that cannot be reconciled” with the facts.
The appellate panel wrote it was particularly puzzled by Coleman’s “general emphasis on Daoud’s awkwardness, goofiness and impressionability,” saying the record did not reflect that those character traits played a major role in his crimes.
“We do not see how social ineptitude could excuse repeated violent criminal behavior that reflected an extraordinary disregard for human life,” Judge Amy St. Eve wrote in the opinion, which was joined by Judges Kenneth Ripple and Michael Brennan.
Daoud’s attorney at the time, Thomas Anthony Durkin, told the Tribune the appellate court’s opinion was “wrongheaded” and slapped away the “sound discretion” of a good judge with an intimate knowledge of the defendant.
“In hindsight we should have tried these cases so the public could have seen the callousness and absurdity of the government’s tactics,” Durkin wrote at the time.
Daoud represented himself at his resentencing.
jmeisner@chicagotribune.com
