A federal appeals court Thursday rejected arguments that a 54-year prison sentence should be reduced for a man who was convicted of planting pipe bombs at Florida A&M University in what authorities said were racially motivated incidents.
A panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said Lawrence Lombardi was not entitled to a reduced sentence based on changes in federal sentencing guidelines.
Lombardi was convicted in 2000 on six charges related to setting off the pipe bombs in bathrooms at the historically Black university. No one was injured in the two bombings.
A U.S. Supreme Court decision in a separate case later led to two of the six convictions being tossed out, and U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle in 2020 resentenced Lombardi to 54 years in prison.
Lombardi, now 67, worked for a business that serviced vending machines at the university. The pipe bombs exploded Aug. 31, 1999, in a bathroom of the university’s Lee Hall and on Sept. 22, 1999, in the Perry-Paige Building, according to a brief filed in 2021 by federal prosecutors in another appeal by Lombardi.
After the bombs exploded, an anonymous caller made racially charged phone calls to local news media.
The appeals-court panel Thursday upheld a decision by Hinkle declining to reduce the sentence.
The panel, made up of Judges Adalberto Jordan, Jill Pryor and Andrew Brasher, rejected Lombardi’s arguments related to the sentencing guidelines, while adding that “on this record, and given Mr. Lombardi’s offenses, we cannot say that the district court abused its discretion in alternatively ruling that it would deny the motion for reduction of sentence even if Mr. Lombardi was eligible for a reduction.”
