A Montana man was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison Wednesday for threatening and attempting to extort Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler in the comment section of one of the mayor’s Instagram posts last fall.
Under a picture of Wheeler preparing to ride his bike to work, Kermit Ty Poulson threatened to throw a Molotov cocktail through the mayor’s bedroom window if he did not fire an officer involved in a recent shooting. Poulson, 40, pleaded guilty in July.
Poulson's defense attorney, Bear Wilner-Nugent, had previously told OPB that Poulson had bipolar disorder and was not acting rationally when he made the threats.
“This is a person with significant mental illness,” Wilner-Nugent told OPB in July. “He admitted on the record that he was drunk, he was off his meds and he was swept up in a heated environment.”
In addition to his 14 months in prison, Poulson was sentenced to one year of supervised release. The case was investigated by the Portland FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Portland Police Bureau.