LEAD: Barefoot Bandit sentenced to six years in jail

By Andy Goldberg Dec 17, 2011, 1:37 GMT

Seattle - The young thief whose daring exploits turned him into a folk hero with the name the Barefoot Bandit was sentenced to seven years in jail Friday after pleading guilty to 33 state felony charges.

Colton Harris-Moore, 20, gained international renown when he evaded authorities trying to apprehend him from 2008 to 2010 for a string of daring robberies and escapes using stolen airplanes and luxury boats.

Harris-Moore has also pleaded guilty on several federal charges on which he will face sentencing next month.

Prosecutors had asked judge Vickie Churchill to impose a maximum sentence of almost ten years on Harris-Moore, who they said was a 'menace' who made people afraid to leave their homes. 'He made decisions, he showed very poor judgement and continued to commit crime after crime after crime,' prosecutor John Henry Browne told the court.

But the judge was sympathetic to the defence narrative that Harris Moore had suffered a miserable childhood raised by an alcoholic mother in a trailer that was often shared with her ex-convict boyfriends.

Harris Moore had been in an out of jail since the age of 12, and it was only when he studied flight manuals and then stole planes that he experienced a passion for life.

'The euphoria of the countdown to takeoff and the realization of a dream was nearly blinding,' he said in a statement to the judge. 'My first thought after takeoff was 'Oh my God, I'm flying.' I had waited my entire life for that moment.'

'This case is a tragedy in many ways, but it's also a triumph of the human spirit in other ways,' said Judge Churchill, calling his upbringing a 'mind-numbing absence of hope.'

'I was struck that I could be reading the history of a mass murderer. I could have been reading about a drug-addicted, alcoholic, abusive man who followed in the footsteps of his mother,' she said. 'That is the triumph of Colton Harris-Moore and the triumph of the human spirit.'

Harris-Moore was arrested in 2010 following a two-year crime spree which ended when he crash-landed a stolen plane in a Bahamas mango grove after flying it from Indiana.

He embarked on his burglary exploits after escaping from a juvenile lock-up and breaking into empty vacation homes on remote islands in Washington state. He earned his nickname by often committing his crimes while not wearing shoes and leaving his footprints in the sand.

He also stole numerous luxury boats and five small planes from rural airports and crash-landed them.

He said that he would use his time in jail to prepare for college, and that he hopes to study aeronautical engineering.

Harris-Moore has agreed to provide restitution to his victims and has reportedly sold the film rights to his story to Fox in a deal that could be worth 1.3 million dollars.

Dustin Lance Black, who won an Academy Award for writing the movie Milk, is working on the screenplay and has met with Harris-Moore several times at the Federal Detention Centre in SeaTac, near Seattle, Washington, according to Lance Rosen, Harris-Moore's entertainment lawyer.