Another Draconian sentence for J6 participants
Two of the Proud Boys are sentenced, one to 17 years and one to 15 years:
Two former leaders of the far-right Proud Boys extremist group were sentenced to more than a decade each in prison Thursday for spearheading an attack on the U.S. Capitol to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Donald Trump to Joe Biden after the 2020 presidential election.
Note the way that’s written – an attack on the Capitol.
Rehl, Biggs, Tarrio and Nordean were convicted of charges including seditious conspiracy, a rarely brought Civil War-era offense…
Federal prosecutors had recommended a 33-year prison sentence for Biggs, who helped lead dozens of Proud Boys members and associates in marching to the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Biggs and other Proud Boys joined the mob that broke through police lines and forced lawmakers to flee, disrupting the joint session of Congress for certifying the electoral victory by Biden, a Democrat. …
“That day broke our tradition of peacefully transferring power, which is among the most precious things that we had as Americans,” the judge said, emphasizing that he was using the past tense in light of how Jan. 6 affected the process.
Defense attorneys argued that the Justice Department was unfairly holding their clients responsible for the violent actions of others in the crowd of Trump supporters at the Capitol.
Perhaps the judge slept through the 2016 riots in DC on Inauguration Day, and the constant challenges to Trump’s election, as well as the soft coup to try to remove him from office through lies supported by agencies such as the FBI.
What did Biggs actually do? As far as I can tell from the article, it was this:
Biggs “acted as the tip of the spear” during the attack, prosecutors said in a court filing. He tore down a fence and charged up scaffolding before entering the Capitol. He left the Capitol but reentered the building and went to the Senate chamber.
As for Rehl:
For Rehl, who also helped lead Proud Boys, prosecutors asked for a 30-year prison sentence. He was seen on video spraying a chemical irritant at law enforcement officers outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, but he repeatedly lied about that assault while he testified at his trial, said prosecutor Erik Kenerson. “He tried to craft a narrative to fit the evidence and he was caught,” Kenerson said.
Rehl also led at least three other men into the Capitol and into a senator’s office, where he smoked and posed for pictures while flashing the Proud Boys’ hand gesture, prosecutors said in court documents.
“Rehl led an army to attempt to stop the certification proceeding, was proud that they got as close as they did, and his only regret in the immediate aftermath was that they did not go further,” they wrote in a court filing.
Kelly read from some of the “chilling” messages Rehl sent after Jan. 6, including one, the judge said, that read, “Everyone should have showed up armed and taken the country back the right way.” The judge shook his head and said, “I mean, my God.”
I mean, thoughtcrime – what he wished he’d done but didn’t do. And, smoking and posing for pictures while flashing the Proud Boys’ hand gesture? Throw the book at him!
And both defendants have been incarcerated already for two and a half years.
The long pre-trial incarcerations, and the length of these sentences, are obviously and egregiously unfair. But that’s the point: to send a message so that no one on the right dare ever do something similar again.
Biggs received 17 years in prison for tearing down a fence on January 6. Meanwhile a guy responsible for burning an entire police station to the ground during the BLM riots got only 4 years. No sane person thinks this is justice.
Erasmus (3:47 pm) mulls, “No sane person thinks this is justice.”
So, who fancies that the left-leaners and the go-alongers are sane? [not M J R . . .]
Erasmus, the sane are just a few, and becoming fewer, Marcuse’s and Gramsci’s “long march through the instiutions” has wildly succeeded. We are no longer America; we have become a new fascist state, governed by those few who would sentence a man to 17 years in prison for agitating against the reigning government ruled by a corrupt, stupid and evil man who is doing the country great harm, as Mugabe did to Zimbabwe. I guess the trial was in DC, before a a prosecutor and a jury all of whom were black Democrats.
It is surely not the America of my childhood.
Yep, I was right: Judge Timothy Kelly is a Federal Judge in the District of Columbia, aka Washington, DC, where he also resides.
The Proud Boys are dangerous dudes. I mean, after all, look at what they stand for:
“A Proud Boy must declare that he is “a Western chauvinist who refuses to apologise for creating the modern world”.
Their platform, such as it is, includes Trumpian ideas (“glorify the entrepreneur”, “close the border”), libertarianism (“give everyone a gun”, “end welfare”) and traditional gender roles (“venerate the housewife”).”
Yep, those are ideas that the left simply can’t abide. Just too, ah, er, retrograde.
The fact that the Proud Boys are willing to mix it up with Antifa can’t be acceptable to the left either. The left wants their Brownshirts to be unopposed.
The world has become a much grimmer place now. Only the “proper authorities” are allowed to assign guilt and innocence. Self-defense and unauthorized ideas are forbidden. Freedom as we once knew it is being forbidden by the powers that be.
I want to comment, but I’m not sure I can. Does the judge think so little of America that a riot could bring down the country? The people protesting J6 could have burned down the Capitol building and guess what? The government would have gone on functioning the same. The witch hunt for the protesters would have been justified, then.
I guess I lied about commenting.
AND, who will stand up for them as they tried to stand up for us?
“that’s the point: to send a message so that no one on the right dare ever do something similar again.”
That’s a path down which unintended consequences for its perpetrators lie. They’re continually turning up the heat, while closing off the pressure relief valve on the societal pressure cooker. Sooner or later things are going to blow and when they do, they’ll double down on the coercion for having made war upon us they see lessening the pressure as an anathema.
That’s when it’s gonna get serious because the time for pretending otherwise will be gone…
“far-right”
A meaningless label nowadays when used by The Left.
So who will fix these obvious wrongs, who will bring those who have perverted Justice to a fitting Justice of their own?
Funny, how no “civil libertarians”–no legions of prominent lawyers, no members of Congress, not even any Supreme Court justices are saying a word–are rallying to the defense of all who have been unjustly arrested, reportedly jailed in abominable conditions, denied their supposed Constitutional rights, tried, sentenced, and imprisoned for wildly excessive terms for things which were not crimes.
@Cicero,
The Sixth Amendment states that the accused must be tried in the state and district where the crime allegedly took place.
In other words, if you don’t want to be tried by a DC jury, then don’t commit crimes in DC.
However, if you MUST commit a crime, then don’t carry a cell phone that can pinpoint your location, don’t do anything illegal where there are hundreds of potential witnesses, and don’t do it in a building where there are cameras that record every square inch every second of every day.
What a crock! My understanding is that the Proud Boys are basically a conservative drinking club, who don’t mind getting in a punch-out, but usually don’t start it.
Hopefully a conservative President will be elected and pardon them!
BJ:
You forgot the most important thing: “Don’t be on the right.” If you’re on the left and you do those things, you’ll either go free or you’ll get a light sentence.
Jefferson Davis served two years confinement ( one of it in a residence with his wife). Robert E Lee and all the other Confederate generals who survived the war served no time. I guess it’s good for them they lived 150 years ago.
BJ:
And especially don’t be egged on by a BLM provocateaur into going unarmed partially through a window (Ashlii Babbitt) where a Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd is eagerly waiting to murder you.
You remember her BJ?
And don’t plant bombs with all those security cameras on the Metro Stations, eh, BJ. Democrat operatives somehow aren’t caught by your FIB, but that doesn’t mean that folks haven’t noticed.
And don’t walk and chew gum if you are a conservative inside the Beltway, eh, BJ?
“Rich Men North of Richmond,” BJ.
Or dare post something ever again.
yes those bombs turned out to be fakes, but the geolocation data glitched, meanwhile a fourth person committed suicide in the Panem prison, (he had been dragged into the Capitol, by the crowd,) Reggie Walton was the rubber stamp to this exercise,
@BJ:
Determination of a crime is by a jury of one’s peers, remember? So let’s not run around accusing people of untried crimes, and let us never again have a Capitol Cop murder a citizen gratuitously.
These so called “Proud Boys” are going to be greatly disappointed if Trump wins a second term (he won’t) that he will not do anything for them. They served their purpose for him and he being the selfish egotist that he is will forget them. To me the Proud Boys and BLM/Antifa goons are just like the Brown Shirts fighting the Reds in the last days of the Weimar Republic.