BK Subway Shooter Frank James 'Not Evil,' He Just 'Snapped': Lawyers

BROOKLYN, NY — Frank James won't survive a prison sentence that reflects the harm he caused when he shot into a crowded subway car and sent dozens of terrified commuters running for their lives, said lawyers hoping to win their client a shortened sentence next week.

"James is not evil," Federal Defenders attorney Mia Eisner-Grynberg wrote Monday in a letter to judge William Kuntz. "He is very, very ill."

Meanwhile prosecutors from the U.S. Attorney's office paint the attack as a long-planned act of terrorism. Prosecutors on Wednesday requested 10 concurrent life sentences for James.

They point to the severity of the crime, which saw James setting off a smoke bomb, firing a handgun more than 30 times, and ultimately pleading guilty to 10 counts of committing a terrorist attack against mass transit, Attorney General Merrick Garland said.

Attorneys for James, who pleaded guilty in January to shooting 10 people on a crowded Sunset Park subway car in April 2022, hope to see the sentence shortened to 18 years.

They say, that at age 64, "Frank James will not survive any prison sentence that reflects the harm he caused."

James' attack was not fatal — it displayed "recklessness, rather than a willful intent to kill," the lawyers argue. They note he suffered mental illness and "decades of degradation and discrimination, both real and perceived."

The pressure forced James to "snap," his lawyers said. They called James' attack a cry for help.

"His entire life had been defined by trauma and hardship, inexplicably bound up in his untreated severe mental illness," lawyers said, detailing James' life and failed efforts to access help and years in and out of psychiatric care.

"By eighteen, he was exhibiting such disturbing behavior that a train conductor hit him in the head with a stick to subdue him," she wrote.

Years later he would return to New York and attempt to set fire to a radio station through which he had heard voices — an "episode" that landed him on Rikers Island, Eisner-Grynberg wrote.

All the while, James tried and failed to hold down jobs, housing and psychiatric treatment, she wrote.

According to Eisner-Grynberg, a doctor who evaluated James concluded: "The circumstances which led to the actions for which Mr. James presently faces sentencing are indeed largely due to an inadequate mental health system."

As many news outlets did following the attack, James' lawyers noted his obsession with conspiracy theories, born of his paranoid schizophrenia. and Youtube videos detailing his gripes with New York City.

"He retreated fully inward, isolating himself to the point where his only human interaction was via YouTube." Eisner-Grynberg said in the letter. "In all of his videos, he is paranoid, drunk, and plainly unwell.