Here's his lawyer, Brenda Weksler:
All she's missing is the pussy hat.
Posted on 05/05/2017 11:43:58 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Michael Sandford stopped calling his mother last May. He was in a foreign country, unemployed and living out of a car, but he had a plan. He had learned how to shoot a gun. He wanted to kill Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The autistic 20-year-old British man set out from California at about the same time his mother, Lynne, reported him as missing.
In June, Sandford showed up at a Trump rally in Las Vegas. As the candidate spoke before a raucous crowd, the Briton moved close to the stage. He noticed a holstered gun strapped to a policeman's side and suddenly lunged for it.
After the officer had restrained the slightly built young man, Sandford said he was trying to shoot Trump.
In the fall, Sandford's lawyers argued that their client was in the midst of a psychotic episode at the time of the incident. Michael Sandford tearfully apologized for his actions. He was convicted of "disrupting an official function" and illegally possessing a firearm and sentenced to a year in prison.
"You should not be ashamed or embarrassed about [your condition]," the judge told Sandford during his sentencing. "You need medication. You're not a hardened criminal. You're not evil or a sociopath like a lot of people we have."
On Friday, British news outlets reported that Sandford had been quietly released from prison after five months and had arrived back in the United Kingdom on Thursday.
Lynne Sandford told the BBC that her son "had been frequently put on suicide watch in prison and claimed Trump-supporting guards and inmates had been making his life a misery."
Punishment for assassins and would-be assassins of presidential candidates is usually far greater than five months in prison. In 1912, a German immigrant named John Schrank shot Theodore Roosevelt in the chest while Roosevelt was speaking in Milwaukee. The former president famously went on finish his speech. Shrank spent the rest of his life in prison. New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy was shot to death in 1968 in Los Angeles. His assassin, Sirhan Sirhan, is still incarcerated. Alabama Gov. George Wallace was paralyzed by a gunman's bullet in 1972, ending his presidential bid. His attacker, Arthur Bremer, spent 35 years in prison before being paroled in 2007.
U.S. officials have not publicly commented but apparently do not consider Sandford a threat to President Trump. Lynne Sandford has said her son's disabilities are obvious. His speech is slow, his hands shake. He often seems confused.
"Trying to grab a policeman's gun?" she said shortly after Michael's arrest last year. "He wouldn't have stood a chance."
Here's his lawyer, Brenda Weksler:
All she's missing is the pussy hat.
That’s a horrible and untrue thing to say.
Still laughing!
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