A second man who pleaded guilty to the 2020 plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer was sentenced to four years behind bars Thursday.
Kaleb Franks testified against several of his alleged co-conspirators and received a significantly lighter sentence as a result. Guidelines suggested the minimum sentencing for his crimes should be about a dozen years, but a judge opted to give Franks a break and will also credit him for the roughly two years in prison he has already served.
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“I want to start by saying I’m sorry to the governor and her family,” Franks said during a hearing, the Detroit News reported. “I understand that this experience had to have been very traumatizing and difficult. I’m ashamed and embarrassed and I regret every decision I made.”
Franks helped construct a training site for the kidnapping ploy and even participated in a scouting visit to Whitmer’s vacation home, though she was not there at the time, prosecutors said. Last February, he became the second alleged plotter to enter a guilty plea, following Ty Garbin, who recently received a 2-1/2-year prison sentence.
Prosecutors conceded that Franks’s testimony was crucial to their case against the others in the plot because it buttressed Garbin’s account of events.
“Testifying not only once, but twice, where literally the nation is focused on what you’re doing, it does I think take a greater toll and exact a greater price,” U.S. District Judge Robert Jonker said, according to the Detroit News.
His testimony helped usher in the August conviction of Adam Fox and Barry Croft Jr., two men accused of being the ringleaders in the conspiracy. “Croft and Fox actually intended to murder the Governor in order to trigger a civil war,” prosecutors noted in that trial.
At the time, the group was agitated with Whitmer over her stringent COVID-19 suppression policies. The plan was thwarted in October 2020, when the FBI arrested the conspirators in a sting operation.
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Franks’s sentencing coincided with a trial of three other alleged conspirators in the case. Peter Musico, Joseph Morrison, and Paul Bellar are facing multiple charges for providing support to the plot. They do not stand accused of directly participating in the scheme, according to the Associated Press.
Franks was one of six alleged conspirators slapped with federal charges pertaining to the kidnapping scheme. Four of those six either pleaded guilty or were convicted, while two — Daniel Harris and Brandon Caserta — were acquitted, NBC News reported.
Croft is scheduled to face sentencing on Dec. 28 and Fox on Dec. 12.
