Just over a week after the riot, Chansley demanded a pardon from Trump because he believed he stormed the CapitolAt least three defense attorneys will blame election misinformation and conspiracy theories, much of it pushed by Trump, for leading their clients astray,. Those who spread the lies are just as responsible for the violence, they said.
“I kind of sound like an idiot now saying it, but my faith was in him,” Capitol riot defendant Anthony Antonio told the AP, referring to Trump. Antonio said he wasn’t interested in politics before he got swept up in the election by Trump and the right-wing media. “I think they did a great job of convincing people.”
Christopher Slobogin, a psychiatry professor and director of Vanderbilt Law School’s Criminal Justice Program, doesn’t believe the defense argument will work in court. “Just because you have a fixed, false belief that the election was stolen doesn’t mean you can storm the Capitol,” he said. But Ziv Cohen, a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University, noted that “conspiracy theories may lead people to commit unlawful behavior.”
That’s “one of the dangers,” he told the AP. “Conspiracy theories erode social capital. They erode trust in authority and institutions.”
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