Matthew Llaneza (Part 10)
Fragments of a future narrative
February 27, 2014. Matthew’s sentencing hearing. The Honorable Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, a District Judge, presided.
“This case,” she conceded, “on top of the mental illness, just seemed to indicate that there are individuals who have been rejected time and time again; who are looking for people who will accept them.”
She added that the Bureau might have entrapped Matthew, but that she didn’t “know enough about any of the specifics to know whether or not that [allegation] would have been warranted.” She said, “it merits consideration that the defendant only had one prior felony conviction—and that was for possession; not for any actual crime of violence against any individual in any way, shape, or form.”
Given these considerations, Judge Gonzalez Rogers decided a sentence of 15 years was appropriate. Matthew currently serves it at FMC Fort Worth. He’s due for release in February 2026.
FMC was a new designation for me, when I looked him up. There are only a half-dozen Federal Medical Centers in the U.S.; these facilities, as the name suggests, “house inmates requiring serious, ongoing medical attention.”
My armchair diagnosis, as I’ve mentioned elsewhere, is that Matthew requires this attention more than any other prisoner I’ve come to know. “I have alot of drwaings and sketches that can be revolutionary for space travel,” he once promised me.
And while there’s little information, apart from Bureau of Prisons literature, on FMCs, what’s out there is alarming: runaway COVID, death from neglect. Grounds, in short, for future research.