A now-disbarred New York City attorney was sentenced Friday to 15 months for firebombing an empty police vehicle along with another lawyer using a Molotov cocktail in the midst of violent clashes with authorities following the murder of George Floyd.
Urooj Rahman asked a judge to spare her from serving prison time and give her a “second chance,” in what she described as a lapse of judgment.
“I’m so incredibly sorry for my reckless and wrong actions,” Rahman said in a Brooklyn federal court, Fox New York reported. “I don’t think there’s enough words to express my sorrow and regret. … I completely lost my way in the emotion of the night.”
Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman are pictured in photos taken by U.S. authorities following their arrests in New York on May 30, 2020. Rahman has been sentenced to 15 months for firebombing an NYPD vehicle.
(U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York/Handout via Reuters )
U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan praised the Ivy League-trained attorney for choosing a career in public interest law to fight against social injustices.
“You’re a remarkable person who did a terrible thing on one night,” Cogan said before admonishing her behavior, the news outlet reported. “It displays an amazing amount of arrogance. … It’s just a very arrogant way to think.”
Rahman and Colinford Mattis, a corporate lawyer and Brooklyn community board member, were arrested after allegedly passing out incendiary devices to demonstrators in a crowd in Brooklyn during clashes with the NYPD, days after Floyd died in Minneapolis during an arrest.
Floyd’s death set off a nationwide wave of protests and clashes between demonstrators and police.
Both attorneys were arrested after Mattis, who was in the driver’s seat of a van, pulled over near the 88th police precinct, and Rahman got out and tossed a lit Molotov cocktail into a police cruiser.
Nobody was injured in the attack but security cameras recorded Rahman hurling the cocktail into the police vehicle, which was severely damaged.
This image shows one of many NYPD vehicles burned in New York City during demonstrations that broke out on May 31, 2020, after George Floyd’s death.
(GHI/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)
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Officers said they found a lighter, a Bud Light beer bottle filled with toilet paper, and a gasoline tank in the back of the minivan driven by Mattis.
Rahman and Mattis have both been disbarred. Mattis is expected to be sentenced in December.
