Of the more than 1,500 criminal defendants charged in the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, David Dempsey is one of the most notorious.
Dempsey, a Van Nuys resident, was accused by federal prosecutors of being “one of the most violent rioters” and was sentenced in August to one of the harshest sentences ever after pleading guilty to assaulting a law enforcement officer with a firearm. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. They used dangerous weapons and invaded the chambers of Congress.
Dempsey is now one of the many defendants in the Jan. 6 shooting, and President-elect Donald Trump is wondering if and how he will fulfill his sometimes confusing campaign promise to pardon them. I’m anxiously waiting for news from.
An annotated video from the Department of Justice shows David Dempsey of Van Nuys stomping on a police officer in the Lower West Terrace Tunnel of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
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“Whether nothing happens, more individualized relief, or a full-scale “We are all doing our best to prepare for anything, regardless of whether a pardon is granted.”
“Trump is so unconventional that we have no idea how this process is going to go. He’s full of surprises,” Collins said. “We have to be prepared for everything and be prepared for any guidance that may come, formal or informal.”
Supporters of the president-elect stormed the Capitol after his rally on the National Mall to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. Federal authorities said 140 police officers were assaulted and millions of dollars in damages were caused.
President Trump, who is federally indicted for his actions that day, called the defendants on Jan. 6 “hostages” and “patriots” who stormed the Capitol with “love in their hearts.”
During a CNN town hall in May 2023, President Trump said, “We’re going to pardon a lot of them,” but “I can’t say about all of them because maybe some of them got out of control.”
In an interview with Time magazine in April, President Trump said he would “absolutely” consider pardoning all of the defendants on Jan. 6. At a gathering of black journalists in July, he said these defendants were victims of a “very harsh system” that treated them more harshly than racial justice protesters who caused harm in other cities. suggested.
Since Trump’s election, his team has said he intends to keep his Jan. 6 promise to help the defendants. Mark Paoletta, a lawyer on the transition team, told X earlier this month that Trump would “grant pardons and commutations to the January 6 defendants and other defendants facing politically driven legal prosecutions and sentences.” He wrote that he was re-elected to carry out his agenda. ”
Conservative activist Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, walks with attorney Mark Paoletta to a meeting with the House committee investigating the January 6 riot in 2022.
(J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press)
However, Paoletta did not provide details. Trump’s team did not respond to requests for comment.
Experts said the path forward largely depends on Mr. Trump.
“Once he takes office, he has almost unlimited power to do whatever he wants,” said Kim Wehr, a professor at the University of Baltimore School of Law and author of “The Pardon Power: How the Pardon System Works.”
On Jan. 6, defendants with pending cases or appeals have asked for a delay as they wait to hear from President Trump, according to a review of federal court filings by The Times. Some were approved, some were denied. Lawyers for the January 6 offenders, who are already in prison, said they were already gathering documents so they could apply for clemency as soon as the process is clear.
“There’s an expectation that Mr. Trump will do it. He’s said so himself. But we don’t know how this is going to play out or when it’s going to happen,” said 9, who was sentenced to two years in prison at Lake Elsinore. said Nikolai Kosis, lawyer for Derek Kinnison, who was sentenced to months. In April, he was convicted along with a group of other California men on conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and other related charges.
The men are all members of the Three Percenters militia group and are accused of coordinating the movement from California to Washington, D.C., to stop Biden’s victory. The group, known as the “DC Brigade,” included former La Habra Police Chief Alan Hostetter.
Alan Hostetter speaks at a pro-Trump rally he organized at the Orange County Voter Registration Office in Santa Ana in 2020.
(Paul Basebach/Associated Press)
Corcis said Kinnison is a good candidate for a pardon because he has no criminal history prior to Jan. 6, has not been charged with any serious act of violence, and did not enter the Capitol. he claimed.
Another member of the DC Brigade was Russell Taylor of Ladera Ranch, who was sentenced to six months of home detention after pleading guilty.
Prosecutors said Taylor, who wore body armor and carried a knife and a hatchet, helped police break through lines, and was initially facing a harsher penalty, but the decision was made against Hostetter. He was given a lenient sentence after agreeing to testify.
Dyke Huesch, Taylor’s attorney, said he is “looking forward” to seeing President Trump clarify his pardon plan.
Husi noted that pardon applications are traditionally reviewed by the Office of the Pardon Attorney, but given the eligibility restrictions, President Trump may want to bypass that process. He said he studied President Carter’s executive order shortly after taking office in 1977 that pardoned thousands of men who had dodged the Vietnam War draft.
In any case, Huesch said that even if President Trump’s intention was to grant a “mass pardon,” many lawyers expect there to be some nuances or exceptions, so the Trump transition team said it expects to soon issue guidance for attorneys handling the Jan. 6 case.
A mob, fueled by President Trump’s claims of election fraud, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election results for Joe Biden.
(Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)
“Not all events on January 6 are the same,” Huesch said. “There are a small number of locations that need to be looked at carefully because there has been violence and people have been injured.”
Collins, Dempsey’s attorney, declined to discuss his case in detail, citing his pending appeal. However, she mentioned the possibility of a pardon in a recent request for an extension of his case.
She cited a variety of reasons for the extension, including her own busy schedule, but also noted President Trump’s election just days earlier and his repeated promise to pardon the defendants on January 6. .
Collins said that given the “high profile” of Dempsey’s case and the severity of his sentence, which he said was the second-longest of all defendants on January 6, Dempsey ” He may be considered one of the more suitable candidates.” peace of mind. “
Dempsey was accused of being a central figure in the rebellion. Federal prosecutors say that during the siege, which lasted more than an hour, he used other insurrectionists as “human scaffolding”, climbed to the front of the crowd, fashioned flagpoles and furniture into weapons, and “violently assaulted and injured police officers.” ” he claimed. Police said he sprayed one officer with pepper spray and hit another officer so severely with a metal crutch that the officer’s gas mask cracked and he fell backwards.
Video from the Department of Justice shows David Dempsey throwing a pole at police in the Lower West Terrace tunnel of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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The extension was granted, pushing the deadline for arguments in Dempsey’s appeal to March, two months after Trump took office.
Joe Allen, a lawyer who represented several defendants on January 6, said many people at the Capitol were obsessed with President Trump and believed they were delivering justice on his behalf. He said he believed President Trump had “taken advantage” of them.
Many people are still watching President Trump’s every word and have “pretty high expectations for what Donald Trump can do for them right now,” he said. . [thinking]“We were in your army. Now we are prisoners. So what are you going to do to save us? ”
He suggested that President Trump appoint a bipartisan commission to review all the events that occurred on January 6th and look for cases that might warrant a pardon. Because some of the people there are “kind of caught up in the crowd.”
The Department of Justice estimates that it had indicted 1,561 defendants on January 6th. Of those, 590 were charged with assaulting, resisting, obstructing or obstructing a law enforcement officer, and 645 were sentenced to a period of imprisonment, the ministry said. Nearly 980 defendants pleaded guilty, and the remaining 210 were convicted at trial. The department is currently investigating other cases.
Wehr, the Baltimore law professor, said President Trump could issue a strict order declaring pardons for a list of named individuals, the entire defendants, or everyone indicted that day.
In any case, individual defendants and their attorneys will have work to do, Wehrle said, including filing motions to dismiss the cases or release them, citing President Trump’s pardon proclamation as a legal basis.
Jeffrey Crouch, a law professor at American University and an expert on the pardon process, said modern presidents have often relied on the pardon attorney’s office, but President Trump is clearly willing to take a different approach. He said he only relied on the agency for 25 years. Of 238 amnesty grants during his tenure.
“He has mostly chosen to have his demands evaluated by his own people,” Crouch said, granting leniency to “political allies, celebrities, military personnel and others.”
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