YAKIMA — Despite his efforts to take back a guilty plea, a Wapato man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison for assaulting a federal marshal.
Leo John Yallup, 38, was sentenced Thursday in U.S. District Court on a charge of assaulting a federal officer with a deadly weapon. The charge stems from his arrest at a house in the 1100 block of Donald Wapato Road March 2, 2023.
U.S. Marshals and the Pacific Northwest Violent Offender Task Force were attempting to arrest Yallup on a warrant charging him with violating his supervised release on his conviction as a felon in possession of a firearm.
Yallup ran from the marshals and, according to court documents, pulled a gun from his waistband and pointed it at a deputy marshal. One of the task force officers shot three times, hitting Yallup in the head.
When they went to perform first aid on Yallup, the marshals found one pistol under Yallup with a loaded magazine and a round in the firing chamber, and a second pistol with a chambered round in a shoulder holster.
In June, Yallup pleaded guilty to a single count of assaulting an officer, and in return prosecutors dropped charges of brandishing, carrying and using a firearm in a crime of violence, and being a felon in possession of a firearm.
But in September, Yallup tried to back out of the plea agreement, arguing that prosecutors breached the pact by investigating him for a possible murder charge. Yallup, in court papers, argued that if he had known about that investigation he would never have pleaded guilty and, thus, his guilty plea was “not knowingly made.”
Yallup also argued that he was threatened by the deputy marshals involved in his shooting, whom he said also transported him to the courthouse from the Yakima County jail.
“I was told that ‘if I make it hard for them, they will make it hard for me’,” Yallup declared in a court document. “I feel that I was forced to plead guilty.”
But Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Swensen responded that he was not aware of the FBI’s interview with an informant about the murder, and that even if he were, the homicide was not related to Yallup’s current case. He also said that homicide allegation was still in the formative stages of an investigation at the time of the plea agreement.
“Although the FBI had information that the defendant may have been involved in a homicide on the Yakama (Nation) Indian Reservation, at the time it was simply an allegation by a known methamphetamine addict who was looking to provide information to get consideration for pending state charges,” Swensen wrote. “This was the beginning stages of an investigation, which is currently ongoing.”
Yallup never indicated during his plea hearing that he had been threatened by the deputies, even after taking a 20-minute break to confer with his own attorney.
Judge James L. Robart denied Yallup’s request and, at Thursday’s hearing, ordered him to prison for 10 years, with three years on supervised release after he is out.
