Kentucky rioter gets harshest sentence yet: 14 years for attacking police amid Jan. 6 insurrectionA Kentucky man was just handed down the harshest-yet sentence among those who have been charged in connection with the insurrection attempt in January 2021, according to reports.
Peter Schwartz, who already had a history of criminal activity prior to the insurrection, reportedly threw a chair at officers and sprayed them with pepper spray as he and his then-wife stormed the Capitol.
Lawyers for Schwartz sought a sentence of four years and six months, arguing that his actions were based on a "misunderstanding" of what happened in the 2020 election, but U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta felt that 14 years was appropriate, Associated Press reports.
Mehta said Schwartz was a “soldier against democracy” who participated in “the kind of mayhem, chaos that had never been seen in the country’s history," AP says.
The outlet added some additional quotes from Mehta to Schwartz:
“You are not a political prisoner,” the judge told him, the report says. “You’re not somebody who is standing up against injustice or fighting against an autocratic regime.”
As for Schwartz, he quickly addressed the judge prior to hearing the sentence, saying, “I do sincerely regret the damage that Jan. 6 has caused to so many people and their lives.”
AFPProud Boys juror says deleted messages convinced him of guiltDespite sifting through thousands of text messages and private chats sent by Proud Boys leaders in the run-up to the Jan. 6, attack on the U.S. Capitol, it was the ones that were absent that helped seal the seditious conspiracy case against them, a juror said.
Speaking to Vice News, juror Andre Mundell said he was convinced that four of the Proud Boys that stood trial in Washington DC were guilty because of the lengths they went to cover their tracks.
That included deleting key messages.
“The Proud Boys didn’t want everybody to know the plan, because then I guess it would have gotten out,” he said. “And they didn’t want it to get out,”
He said the many messages the jury reviewed, sent between defendants Enrique Tarrio Ethan Nordean, Joe Biggs and Zachary Rehl, were littered with blank spaces where others had been deleted.
All were found guilty of the conspiracy charge Thursday. A fifth defendant, Dominic Pezzola, was acquitted of seditious conspiracy but convicted of other charges.
“So, they definitely didn’t want people to know,” he said.
He said the jury was also struck by the lack of messages telling followers to withdraw from the attack on the Capitol.
“That factored in for me,” he said. “It showed an absence of evidence of standing down. No one says, ‘no, don’t do this. We’re not going to do this.’ There was none of that,”
“And that was probably because they never said it.”
Read More Here: https://www.vice.com/en/article/epvxqw/enrique-tarrio-proud-boys-jury
