Thanks to an admirer in the White House, this convicted terrorist had his prison sentence reduced by over 30 years. The people his gang murdered remain dead and unavailable for comment.
Oscar Lopez Rivera, who for decades has been in prison for his role in a Puerto Rican nationalist group connected to terrorist attacks in U.S. cities, will be released on Wednesday.
Former President Barack Obama commuted Lopez Rivera’s sentence, which was expected to expire in 2051, just three days before he left the White House in January, allowing the convicted felon to be freed on May 17, 2017.
Now, Lopez Rivera, 74, “will be celebrated as a hero upon his early release” and honored next month in New York City’s Puerto Rican Day parade, the Associated Press reported.
Lopez Rivera was originally convicted of crimes committed while he was a member of the Armed Forces of National Liberation, known by its Spanish acronym FALN, a leftist, violent separatist group that sought complete independence for Puerto Rico.
During the 1970s, FALN claimed responsibility for more than 100 bombings across New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. One of the bombings, at the Fraunces Tavern in New York in 1975, killed four people and injured more than 60 others.
For his crimes, Lopez Rivera was sentenced in 1981 to 55 years in prison for “seditious conspiracy” and other felonies, and an additional 15 years in 1988 “for conspiracy to escape; to transport explosives with intent to kill and injure people; and to destroy government buildings and property,” according to CNN.