A decade after federal authorities say he tried to set off an inert 1,000-pound car bomb outside a downtown Chicago bar, a Hillside man says he wants to take back the guilty plea he entered in 2018 and go to trial.
U.S. District Judge Sharon Johnson Coleman in 2018 accepted a specialized guilty plea from Adel Daoud, now 29, in which he admitted to the facts surrounding his arrest but denied culpability. It’s known as an Alford plea, and the judge accepted it over the objection of prosecutors.
The move by Daoud could further delay a case that began with his arrest at the age of 18 in September 2012. It has already been delayed by Daoud’s mental health issues, as well as an appellate court’s ruling that Coleman “downplayed the extreme seriousness” of the matter when she sentenced Daoud to 16 years in prison in 2019. His sentence was overturned.
Daoud’s new defense attorney, Quinn Michaelis, argued in a motion filed early Tuesday that Daoud had “several legitimate defenses amounting to legal innocence which he abandoned at the last minute,” based on his previous attorney’s concerns about Daoud’s mental health.
“It appears that Mr. Daoud’s previous counsel’s concerns about Mr. Daoud’s mental health trumped all other paths forward,” Michaelis wrote.
Daoud was arrested at the end of a monthslong FBI investigation. It culminated with an undercover FBI agent providing him with an inert bomb installed in a Jeep that reeked of gasoline and was filled with wiring and bags of fertilizer. Authorities nabbed Daoud after he allegedly tried to set off the bomb outside the Cactus Bar & Grill.
After his arrest, Daoud allegedly enlisted a fellow jail inmate in an attempt to have the undercover FBI agent killed. And in 2015, Daoud allegedly attacked another inmate who had taunted him with a drawing of the prophet Muhammad.
After the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Daoud’s sentence, his case was taken away from Coleman. The case is now being handled by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly.
For now, Daoud is being held in Chicago’s downtown Metropolitan Correctional Center, prison records show.
