A federal judge sentenced ex-hippie David Ansberry to 27 years in prison on Friday for planting a homemade bomb in front of the Nederland police station to exact revenge for the 1971 murder of his old friend Deputy Dawg by the town marshall.

Federal Judge Christine Arguello also sentenced David Michael Ansberry, 67, to five years of supervised release following his prison sentence.

The defendant “carefully and calculatingly” planned an explosive retaliation for the death of his friend, Guy “Deputy Dawg” Gaughnor, Arguello said.

Ansberry, who sat in a wheelchair wearing green prison clothing, often shook his head with a look of contempt at the way Arguello and prosecutors interpreted what he considered a non-violent act of protest.

In a rambling statement to the judge, Ansberry compared other devices of mass destruction — including the bomb that “vaporized” Hiroshima at the end of World War II — to his mere attempt to blow up a bomb when no one was around.

Invoking the 1970 Kent State shooting and other police shootings over the decades, Ansberry explained his motive in planting the improvised explosive device.

Ansberry, who stands 3-foot-6 and went by the aliases Jessie Howard and Midget Jessie, tried 11 times to detonate the bomb on Oct. 11, 2016 with a cellular phone, authorities have said.

Prosecutor Greg Holloway argued Friday that Ansberry created a device containing highly volatile and dangerous explosive chemicals that could easily have gone off and killed innocent bystanders. He asked Arguello to sentence Ansberry to 30 years in prison.

“What could have happened is horrifying. It’s abhorrent… indiscriminate revenge,” Holloway said in a raised voice.

Ansberry pleaded guilty in July to a charge of attempting to ignite a weapon of mass destruction. In late October and early November, he underwent a two-day sentencing hearing in U.S. District Court that ended with Arguello asking both sides to file briefs on the issue of whether Ansberry committed a terrorist act.

“The act I have taken responsibility for was intended to bring to the public’s attention the continuing tragedy of the murders of unarmed civilians by a few in law enforcement,” Ansberry wrote in a letter to the judge. “I did not seek to terrorize or cause the public pain as it would be counterproductive to my goal.”

In his letter, he acknowledged that he had a personal stake in one of the fatal police shootings that he said have continued to recent years, as illustrated in the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

“When I was 19, in 1971, a town marshal who elected himself judge, jury and executioner summarily executed Guy Gaughnor, also 19, and who I considered my brother. Guy died alone in the dark woods outside of Nederland, Colorado, with a bullet to his head,” Ansberry wrote. “Those who aided and abetted Guy’s executioner, some who still walk the streets of Boulder County, shielded his executioner for 30 years. He died never having served a day in jail.”

Former Nederland Marshal Renner Forbes confessed to the killing of Guy “Deputy Dawg” Gaughnor in 1997, three years before his death, but was never prosecuted.

Early on the morning of Oct. 11, 2016, Ansberry left a backpack containing an IED outside the then-empty Nederland police station, which sits in a strip mall. Nederland police officer Darragh O’Nuallain later brought the bag into the station, where it sat for 40 minutes before he opened it and realized it contained a bomb.

An STP oil sticker with the phrase “RIP Deputy Dawg Murdered by Marshal 7/17/71” was found near the Nederland police station the day of the attempted bombing. Ansberry had belonged to a hippie group called the STP Family in the early 1970s.

“The evidence presented at the sentencing hearing (last fall) demonstrated that Ansberry created an improvised explosive device (IED), deciding to use HMTD, an extremely volatile and unstable high explosive,” prosecutors wrote in a brief.

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