Have you ever wondered what our prisons and jails would look like if the 2020 Black Lives Matter rioters got the “January 6th treatment”? Well, it’s hard to imagine such a parallel world. We don’t have enough prison cells to hold tens of thousands of people. Hundreds of thousands — individuals who, under the standards of justice laid down by the January 6th killings, would likely languish in prison for years.
Unfortunately, the judges on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals have no standards of justice and appear to have no conscience.
We cannot allow these corrupt judges to continue to hide their blatant perversion of justice forever.
On June 21, 2023, nearly two and a half years after the Capitol breach, the FBI arrested New Hampshire grandmother Cindy Young. Surveillance footage showed her inside the Capitol on January 6, 2021. What crime did she commit? FBI complaint The complaint does not disclose any alleged criminal activity beyond being in the rotunda of a public building. It alludes to Young being wearing an American flag and pro-Trump paraphernalia. The complaint states Young was “seen holding a Trump ‘NO MORE BULLS**T’ flag.”
According to the FBI’s worldview, that It’s a crime.
In fact, the FBI included this photo from Getty Images on page two of the criminal complaint as if it were conclusive evidence of guilt.
Young has never been violent. She has never even stepped outside the velvet rope. She has been under the prosecutor’s sword for three and a half years. She is bankrupt and faces up to four years in prison.
Now imagine how many people were in the crowds that engaged in not only disorderly conduct, trespassing, and vandalism, but also criminal activity, arson, and murder during the 2020 Summer of Love. That number could easily be 100,000.
Those who committed the most egregious acts during those weeks in the name of “justice” for George Floyd have not received adequate punishment and, in fact, have benefited from calls for leniency from federal prosecutors.
Montez Terriel Lee Jr. Convicted in 2022 Imagine if the January 6th defendant, who set fire to a private business in Minneapolis and killed bystander Oscar Stewart, had also burned down parts of the Capitol and killed innocent people. Surely he would be on federal death row by now. And rightly so. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio is currently serving a 22-year sentence in federal prison for sedition and conspiracy, but he wasn’t even in the Capitol. Others who fought with police are serving 12-year sentences with no criminal record.
But Montes He was sentenced to just 10 years.He is due to be released in eight years, despite a criminal record that includes theft and assault.
Last week, Cindy Young’s attorney, Jonathan Gross, Motion to Dismiss Her case is based on selective prosecution. He contrasted Young’s case with Lee’s to highlight the selective prosecution approach. Gross noted that the government’s lawyers used Martin Luther King as a leniency bid, even though the Justice Department’s sentencing memorandum showed Lee celebrating the deaths of innocent victims. They wrote that Lee “appeared to believe that she was speaking, in Dr. King’s eloquent words, ‘the language of the deaf,'” implicitly justifying her murderous actions.
“It is undeniable that the government treated the defendants on January 6 differently than protesters who held different views,” Gross argued. “The government’s argument is impossible to meet the standard of selective prosecution and boils down to the belief that the government has unlimited power to decide who to prosecute and who to let go. This has no place in the law of a free country.”
Magistrate Michael Harvey summed up: The motion was denied.He noted he was skeptical that “such generalized and unsupported allegations” constituted selective prosecution.
Well, what about the case of Bryce Williams? He literally orchestrated the burning of Minneapolis Police Station 3 with dozens of police officers trapped inside. They could have easily been killed. He received just 27 months for the May 28, 2020 arson, which should have been charged as attempted murder. Judge Patrick Schiltz I forgave the man Williams called the person who threw the Molotov cocktail at the station a “good person who made a terrible mistake,” adding that it was “easy to understand” that the death of George Floyd had driven him to violence.
in Judgment memoThe Department of Justice condoned Williams’ actions, citing them in part as a pursuit of “racial justice” in St. George. “The government takes Williams at his word and does not believe he participated in the protests with the intent to commit a crime or cause mayhem,” it said, referring to the leader of the direct attack on the entire police station. Williams is now out of prison.
Incredibly, only four people were convicted for the attack, which involved over 100 people and caused over $12 million in damages — far more than the entire January 6th riot caused. Those who are obsessed with selective prosecution and sentencing based on political considerations blithely ignore allegations of double standards. They don’t see it as a double standard because they believe you are guilty based on your beliefs, regardless of your actions.
State and federal governments need to strengthen judicial oversight rules in selective prosecution cases. Selective prosecution motions should be overseen by juries, not judges. We cannot allow these corrupt judges to continue to hide their blatant perversion of justice forever.
Editor’s note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the victim of Montez Terriel Lee Jr.’s arson. The victim was a bystander, not the building’s owner.
