Over two years since the January 6th Capitol riots in Washington D.C, prosecutors have now charged more than a thousand people in relation to the attack, calling it “the most wide-ranging investigation” in the history of the Justice Department. The Justice Department is sifting through mountains of evidence and chasing down tips to sift out the people responsible for the attack. The FBI, as part of the investigation, has been reviewing almost 4 million files, including 30,000 video files. As the investigation moves forward, the department believes that around 2,000 individuals were involved in the attack.
The defendants, who have come from almost all of the 50 states, are a difficult group to generalize. The defendants are predominantly white, but not entirely. Many are ex-military or ex-Law Enforcement, which is concerning to experts. The majority of people facing charges – nearly 85% – do not have any known connection to extremist groups. “It’s not like they all had previous convictions for violence or this kind of long running history of violent assault against political individuals or Law Enforcement. They were just willing to commit violence on that day,” says Jon Lewis, a research fellow at George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
Nearly all of these cases are being heard by 21 federal district court judges in Washington, D.C. The judges, appointed by presidents from both parties, have emphasized that being “sucked into a vortex of misinformation” does not absolve someone of their actions. Judges are also interested in accountability — and whether or not a defendant has made an authentic expression of remorse. This seems to be in part because some of the judges do worry that this could happen again.
The defendants who haven’t received any prison time are often fined, and sentenced to a combination of probation, community service and home confinement, depending on the nature of the case. The vast majority of these defendants are charged only with “parading or demonstrating in the Capitol building.” For sentences through February of this year, there have only been six cases in which judges sentenced defendants to prison time even if prosecutors had not sought it.
Throughout the investigation, NPR has been tracking every case related to the attack as they move through the court system, from the initial arrest to sentencing.
The judges collectively have given less prison time than what prosecutors have sought in around two-thirds of the cases. Despite the harsh words delivered at sentencing, the judges have been cautious with prison time as a punishment. More than half of the people sentenced to longer prison terms, such as two or more years, have been convicted of assault or injuring others.
The investigation has already doubled the FBI’s domestic terrorism caseload, yet the Justice Department is nowhere close to being finished in bringing justice to the Capitol riots. The department may not even be halfway through their investigation yet created from the most substantial investigation in the history of the Justice Department.
Original Story at www.npr.org – 2023-03-25 07:00:00