By Shayna Jacobs
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN SUPREME COURT — The student charged with slashing the throat of a Muslim cab driver was granted bail for the first time Wednesday afternoon.
A Manhattan judge set bail at $500,000 for 19-year-old Michael Enright, the documentary film worker accused of stabbing a cabbie in Murray Hill. Enright's lawyer was unsure if his family would be able to secure a bond at that amount.
If Enright is released, he must wear an ankle tracking device and must adhere to an 8 p.m. curfew, Manhattan Supreme Court Judge Richard Carruthers ordered at his bail hearing earlier.
Enright, of Brewster, N.Y. was previously denied bail and was recently moved from the Bellevue Hospital psychiatric jail ward to Rikers Island.
Prosecutors argued against his potential release, claiming he was too unstable and unpredictable to return to court when required.
"[Enright] admits, through his attorney, that he is an alcoholic and his unreliability has been repeatedly demonstrated in his failure to appear in response to the summonses he's received in connection with his drinking in public and drinking underage," prosecutors wrote in court papers.
But his laywer, Lawrence Fisher, said Enright suffered from alcoholism and post-traumatic sterss disorder after spending time embedded in with troops in Afghanistan where he was filming a documentary.
"This was not a planned, calculated well-conceived plan as [prosecutors] would have you believe," Fisher wrote in his bail application.
Enright, a self-proclaimed "patriot," is accused of slashing the throat of Ahmed H. Sharif, a Queens father and veteran cab driver who picked Enright up in Midtown East on August 24.
The School of Visual Arts senior asked Sharif if he was Muslim and then reached to the front seat and
He faces attempted murder as a hate crime and other charges. If convicted, he would be sentenced to a minimum of eight years in prison.
