ATLANTA — Eric Rudolph, the man sentenced to life imprisonment for deadly bombings at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and an Alabama abortion clinic will not get a chance at a new sentence, an appeals court ruled Monday.
A three-judge of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel ruled that Eric Robert Rudolph remains bound to the terms of his 2005 plea agreement in which he accepted multiple life sentences to escape the death penalty.
Eric Rudolph is bound by the terms of his own bargain. He negotiated to spare his life, and in return he waived the right to collaterally attack his sentences in any post-conviction proceedings,” Judge Britt Grant wrote in the opinion.
Rudolph admitted to carrying out the carrying out the deadly bombing at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics and three other attacks in Georgia and Alabama.
The FBI identified him as a fugitive in 1998. But he remained on the run for 5 more years.
Investigators say they believe Rudolph survived by camping in the Nantahala National Forest near Cherokee and Graham Counties, in North Carolina, by gathering acorns and salamanders, pilfering vegetables from gardens, stealing grain from a grain silo, and raiding dumpsters in Murphy, North Carolina.
It was in Murphy that authorities finally caught up with Rudolph, in May 2003. Rookie Murphy Police Department Officer Jeffrey Scott Postell spotted him behind a dumpster at the local Sav-A-Lot store. Postell, on routine patrol, had at first suspected a burglary in progress.
Rudolph pleaded guilty to multiple counts of arson and of using a destructive device during a crime of violence.
Rudolph argued he was due a new sentence after a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in which justices found that a statute providing enhanced penalties for using a firearm or deadly device during a “crime of violence” was unconstitutionally vague. The 11th Circuit rejected his claim.
The bombing during a musical show at Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta on July 27, 1996, killed one person…
Read the full article here
