Olympic Park bomber asks courts to strike down four life sentences
ATLANTA — Centennial Olympic Park bomber Eric Rudolph is asking federal judges in Atlanta and Birmingham to strike down four of the six life sentences imposed against him.
Rudolph initially filed court motions that he wrote by hand at the maximum-security federal prison in Florence, Colorado. He has since been appointed federal public defenders to represent him.
In 2005, Rudolph pleaded guilty to the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing and the 1997 bombings of a Sandy Springs, Georgia, abortion clinic and the Otherside Lounge, a gay and lesbian nightclub in Atlanta. He also pleaded guilty in Birmingham to bombing an abortion clinic in that city in 1998.
Alice Hawthorne, of Albany, Georgia, was killed by the Olympic Park blast and Melih Uzunyol, a Turkish cameraman, died of a heart attack running to the scene. Off-duty police officer Robert Sanderson died in the Birmingham explosion.
Rudolph hid in isolation in the North Carolina mountains until June 2003 when a police officer in Murphy found him scavenging food from a trash bin behind a grocery store.
The Justice Department sought the death penalty against Rudolph, but he negotiated a plea deal for the six life sentences — four in Atlanta, two in Birmingham — plus 120 years in prison.
In exchange, he disclosed where he had stashed 250 pounds of dynamite in North Carolina.
In a filing this week in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, federal defender Matt Dodge said a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June 2019 should void three of Rudolph’s “crime of violence” convictions and their corresponding life sentences. The high court’s opinion struck down part of an enhanced sentencing law that was applied against Rudolph on those three counts by Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Pannell in 2005.
Pannell has directed the U.S. Attorney’s Office to file a response. Dodge’s motion does not attack the conviction behind the fourth life sentence imposed against Rudolph in Atlanta. There is no parole in the federal system.