In 2009, an American convert to Islam, Abdulhakim Muhammad (pictured), drove to a Little Rock Army recruiting office where he shot and killed Pvt. William Long and wounded Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula.

In his trial last week, the defense attorneys hoped to convince jurors that Muhammad had a delusional disorder — a common ploy in Islamic crimes of violence, because the actions often look like those of a crazy person.

On Monday, however, he arranged a plea deal with the prosecutor in which he pleaded guilty to murder in return for life in prison, to avoid the death penalty.

In Peter King’s hearing last March about the radicalization of Muslims residing in America, one witness was Melvin Bledsoe, the father of the convicted killer, who was originally named Carlos Bledsoe. (Read his testimony.) He told the committee how his son had been ensnared by Islamists in college in Nashville and brainwashed with the hateful ideology of Muslims against the world. In 2007 Muhammad traveled to Yemen to learn about his adopted religion, where he absorbed more of the hate-America belief system. When he returned to this country, he wanted to retaliate against the military for what he considered to be American wars against Islam, leading to the jihadist attack on US soldiers.

An interesting sidebar of the trial is how it supposedly has stirred up the dread fear of “backlash” against Muslims among the local slaves of Allah. There is a problem though: the complaint is supposedly that Muslims are being beaten up and robbed, but nobody has reported a crime to the police, so perhaps a few unkind glances have been magnified by fertile imaginations. Actual hate crimes against Muslims are rare, according to FBI research, but Muslims plug away at their victim fantasy regardless.

Here are more details about the crime and sentence:

Man pleads guilty to recruiting center killing, gets life, CNN, July 2011

(CNN) — A man accused of shooting two soldiers at a military recruiting center in 2009 pleaded guilty Monday to the crime and received a sentence of life in prison without parole.

Abdulhakim Muhammad, formerly known as Carlos Bledsoe, was charged with killing Pvt. William Long, 23, and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula, 18. The attack happened June 1, 2009, outside a recruiting center in Little Rock, Arkansas.

Muhammad faced 12 charges in total — capital murder, attempted capital murder and 10 counts of unlawful discharge of a firearm from a vehicle — according to Stephanie Harris, a spokeswoman with the state court system.

In Arkansas, defendants cannot plead guilty in a case in which the death penalty is a possibility.

Prosecutors agreed to drop the death penalty in exchange for Muhammad’s plea, Harris said.

A Muslim convert from Memphis, Tennessee, Muhammad was 23 at the time of the fatal shooting. He was angry at the U.S. military because of “what they had done to Muslims in the past,” Little Rock homicide Detective Tommy Hudson has said.