Royko's son pleads in attempted bank robbery

The son of late Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko entered a conditional guilty plea Wednesday to a charge of attempted bank robbery.

Robert Royko, 45, entered the unusual conditional plea before U.S. District Judge Wayne R. Andersen, who set June 5 for sentencing.

Andersen ruled earlier that if Royko went to trial he would not be permitted to rely on the defense that he was so intoxicated when he went into the bank that he was incapable of forming a clear intention to rob it.

If the U.S. 7th Circuit Court of Appeals finds that such a defense should have been allowed, Royko will be allowed to withdraw his guilty plea and go to trial.

Royko was arrested in April 2005 after he went into the bank with a fake bomb, donned a ski mask and demanded money.

Defense attorney Gerardo Gutierrez has battled for years to show that Royko is a troubled man who doesn't deserve the kind of harsh sentence that can come with an attempted bank robbery conviction.

He hoped to be able to tell a jury that even though Royko was in the bank with the phony bomb and the ski mask, his intoxicated state was so extreme that he could not form what the law recognizes as the intent to commit robbery.

Andersen said he spent considerable time studying the testimony of experts brought in to describe Royko's condition when the incident took place.

He concluded that Royko "is actually an intelligent person who chose to commit what is a crime and knew what he was doing when he did it."

"He has been so respectful and nice here that it actually pains me physically to say that," Andersen said. He pointed to Royko's "track record of good solid behavior" since the arrest.

Andersen said conditional pleas are unusual and it has been several years since a defendant was allowed to enter a conditional plea in his court.

Prosecutors calculate the maximum potential sentence under advisory only federal guidelines at about 10 years and Gutierrez estimates less than half that time.