The Supreme Court’s decision to review the validity of an obstruction law that was widely used against those involved in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 is already having an impact on some of the rioters.
A small group of people convicted under the law have been released from prison – or will soon be released – although judges hearing their arguments on Tuesday are not expected to rule on the case for months.
In recent weeks, federal judges in Washington have approved the release of about 10 defendants serving prison sentences under the disability law. They said the defendants could wait at home as the court decided whether the law should have been used to jail them in the first place.
Those already released include Matthew Bledsoe, the Tennessee moving company owner who scaled a wall in front of the Capitol and then marched through the building with a Trump flag, eventually planting it in the arm of a statue of President Gerald R. Ford.
Soon to be released are defendants including Kevin Seefried, a drywall installer from Delaware who carried a Confederate flag through the Capitol, and Alexander Sheppard, an Ohio man who overran police lines and became one of the first people to break into the building.
The suspended sentences — which could be reinstated depending on the Supreme Court’s decision — are just one of the complications that have arisen from the court’s review of the obstruction statute, known in the Penal Code as 18 USC 1512. The accusation has been used so widely against more than 350 rioters, including Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon shaman, and members of the far-right groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers.
When the justices announced in December that they planned to review the law, many legal experts expressed concern that a ruling that narrows its scope or prohibits its use in cases related to Jan. 6 would hurt the Justice Department’s efforts, hundreds hold on, deliver a devastating blow, and the rioter could be held accountable.
Federal prosecutors have often used obstruction charges rather than politically charged charges such as seditious conspiracy to punish the central event of Jan. 6: the disruption of a Capitol proceeding to certify the election.
But in recent months, judges and prosecutors working on Capitol insurrection cases have quietly become accustomed to the potential threat of a Supreme Court ruling, and the risk that the cases overall could have catastrophic consequences no longer appears to be the case to be big.
For one thing, according to the Justice Department, there are currently no defendants who are only accused of obstruction. Every rioter charged in this connection has also been accused of other crimes, meaning that even if the obstruction law as a law enforcement tool were abolished on January 6, there would be no case that would disappear completely.
If the court does decide that the obstruction count does not apply to the attack on the Capitol, the decision would primarily impact the penalties the defendants face. The obstruction law carries a hefty maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, and while few, if any, rioters have received that much, the law regularly carries a sentence of several years in prison.
However, some judges have already signaled that they would increase sentences on other charges if the obstruction charge were not available to them.
In February, for example, Judge Royce C. Lamberth denied early release to an Iowa man named Leo Kelly who was sentenced to 30 months in prison for obstruction and six other misdemeanors.
Judge Lamberth’s reason for not releasing Mr. Kelly?
Although the Supreme Court ruled that it was not permitted to convict Mr. Kelly on the obstruction charge, Judge Lamberth said he could extend the defendant’s total prison term by imposing consecutive, rather than concurrent, sentences for the misdemeanor charges.
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2024-04-16 14:59:17
www.nytimes.com