FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (AP) - A last-minute disagreement delayed a planned guilty plea Tuesday by an American who returned from Cuba decades after hijacking a jetliner to the communist island.
The attorney for William Potts, 57, objected to language in a proposed plea deal concerning the 13 years Potts spent in a Cuban prison for the crime. U.S. District Judge Robin Rosenbaum set another hearing for Thursday after prosecutor Maria Medetis said she needed senior-level Justice Department authorization to make any changes.
Prosecutors have opted to charge Potts with kidnapping rather than the previous count of air piracy, which carried a mandatory 20-year prison sentence. The new charge would give Rosenbaum flexibility to give Potts credit for some or all of his Cuban prison years toward his U.S. sentence. He could still get life, and Rosenbaum is under no obligation to consider the Cuban years.
Potts’ attorney David Berube said a plea agreement included language forbidding him to comment on Potts’ time in Cuban prison, which he said would undercut their goal of obtaining a relatively lenient sentence.
“Mr. Potts knows he needs to be punished but we need to take that into consideration,” Berube said of his years behind bars in Cuba. “We don’t want to go to trial. We want to resolve this.”
The FBI says Potts claimed in a note to a flight attendant that he had explosives and threatened to blow up a Piedmont jetliner when he hijacked a New York-to-Miami flight to Havana in March 1984. He also demanded $5 million.
According to the FBI, the New Jersey native described himself then as a black militant using the name “Lt. Spartacus” who was “a soldier in the Black Liberation Army.” The note also discussed freedom for “brothers and sisters” in South Africa and criticized U.S. interference with Nicaragua’s Sandinista government
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