Gyrocopter pilot rejects plea deal for campaign finance stunt

WASHINGTON — The man who flew a gyrocopter through some of the United States’ most restricted airspace and landed in front of the U.S. Capitol to protest what he calls slack campaign finance laws has rejected a plea deal that would have required him to spend 10 months in jail.

A prosecutor and a lawyer for the pilot, Douglas Hughes, discussed the most recent offer Wednesday in federal court in Washington. Hughes’ attorney said he believes federal guidelines call for a sentence of no more than six months.

Hughes said spending significant time in jail doesn’t seem just for an act of civil disobedience in which no one got hurt and no property was damaged.

A mailman from Ruskin, Florida, he landed on the Capitol lawn after a short flight around the District of Columbia in his bare-bones aircraft on April 15 in order to draw attention to what he says is the dangerously outsize influence of money in politics. He carried with him 535 letters about the issue, addressed to the 535 members of Congress.

“There are a lot of people who saw that money in politics is a problem but didn’t know how to get involved,” Hughes told Al Jazeera in May. “I wanted to let them know that we can do something about this. The message is we can always do something.”

His flight, however, may have raised more concerns about security: The Secret Service and other federal law enforcement agencies were baffled by how he managed to pull off his escapade without detection around one of the nation’s most closely guarded buildings.  

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press