Kevin Seefried holds a Confederate flag outside the Senate chamber after breaching the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Federal judges have begun ordering the early release pending appeal of Jan. 6 defendants who challenged their sentences even though the Supreme Court is a week away from hearing arguments on whether a key charge brought against them is legally sound.will be let go one year into his three-year term.
Julie Rose O’Sullivan, a Georgetown law professor and expert on white-collar criminal law, said it was a potentially bad sign for prosecutors that the Supreme Court took the case when there is such strong support for the law at lower levels, including“I think it’s significant that D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals said it applies.
A full rejection by the court “would have a devastating effect on the prosecution side” in Capitol attack felony cases that don’t otherwise involve violence, recently retired U.S. District judge Thomas F. Hogan, who sentenced 26 Jan. 6 defendants, said in a talk to Georgetown Law School students earlier this year. For some, the obstruction charge brought the stiffest penalty, and removing it would mean they would have to be resentenced or retried and face far less severe consequences.
That means the justices could decide the obstruction charge makes legal sense for him, because of his alleged efforts to get Congress to use fraudulent electoral certifications, but not for the rioters, whose alleged obstruction generally involved entering the Capitol in a way that shut down the vote count.conspiracy to defraud the United States and depriving Americans of their right to have their votes counted.
Prosecutors had asked U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden to deny release pending appeal during “what will likely be another fiercely contested presidential election,” saying that doing so “would be releasing defendant into the same political maelstrom that led him to commit his crimes in the first place.”But McFadden rejected the idea that “January 6th defendants, as a class, cannot be released during an election year,” as he put it in an 11-page opinion freeing Seefried on May 31.
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