D.C. judge sentences J6 defendant to 17 years, pioneering new era of cruel and unusual punishment
Leftist judges, who are notoriously soft on violent crime, are surprisingly game to 'cruel and unusual punishment' when the defendant is a low-class right winger.
Which brings us to this judicial travesty from one of the D.C. ruling elites:
Proud Boy Joe Biggs on Thursday was sentenced to 17 years in prison, the second-highest sentence handed down to anyone convicted in connection with the Capitol attack.
Biggs was convicted of sedition and other serious felonies earlier this year after being accused of leading members of the right-wing extremist group to the Capitol and talking with the first rioter to breach police barricades just minutes before he acted.
The Florida Army veteran appeared in court Thursday wearing an orange prison-issued jumpsuit with a white undershirt and black thick-frame glasses, his white hair styled into a mohawk and beard outgrown.
No one was killed, no property was significantly damaged, nothing was set on fire, nobody whipped out a gun, nobody got taken hostage, no mass casualties were strewn through the streets, but here we are.
Apparently this guy knocked over a fence on January 6 and communicated with his like-minded buddies about "real men" and that was enough to trigger the effete judge, who slapped terrorism enhancements onto the man's crime, putting it in the same league as what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed did to the Pentagon and World Trade Center on 9/11.
The judge's reasoning was this:
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly ultimately applied a terrorism enhancement to Biggs’s sentencing guidelines, wherein a defendant must have committed an offense that “was calculated to influence or affect the conduct of government by intimidation or coercion, or to retaliate against government conduct.”
Kelly cited Biggs’s efforts to tear down a fence separating rioters from the Capitol and bringing them “one step closer” to their objective of halting the 2020 election certification as reason for applying the enhancement .
“I really don’t think this is a close call,” he said of the decision.
Which is laughable. All the rioters, aided by a nest of still opaquely known FBI informants, did was manage to disrupt and delay the electoral certification of 2020. Was there any congressional Democrat at the Capitol that day who was so intimidated by the January 6 rioters that he planned to change his vote to Republican?
Of course not.
That vote was going to go through whether it was on January 6 or the next day. There was a minor delay, brought on by bad Capitol policing, a failure by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to permit the National Guard protection that was pro-offered by President Trump, and plenty of FBI provocateurs, in addition to pathetic Proud Boys rabble-rousers like Biggs. Whatever the disruption was it was not an insurrection or coup attempt -- we are watching real insurrections and coups these days in places like Niger and Gabon -- with guns, blood, dead bodies, flights out, and flung suitcases of stolen cash. Those are the real thing.
This wasn't even terrorism -- and comfortable as the judge was about locking up and throwing away the key on this low-class Trump supporter, the New York Times indicated that Kelly actually seemed to know that he was off base, but it didn't matter to him:
While Judge Kelly said the provision was technically applicable, he was less certain — given what Mr. Biggs had actually done — that it fit in a more colloquial sense.
He noted that he had reviewed several cases involving terrorism, most concerning situations where defendants “were training to fight American troops or planning an act like blowing up a large building.” And he expressed skepticism that the Proud Boys had engaged in that kind of behavior on Jan. 6.
Say what?
That the defendant, unlike the 9/11 mastermind, or for that matter, the assorted antifa and Black Lives Matter rioters and vandals who've gotten off with low or no charges, was contrite also counted for nothing with the D.C. judge.
“I know I messed up that day, but I’m not a terrorist,” [defendant Biggs] said through tears.
You don't see that in real terrorists, whether domestic Black Panther types, or crazed Islamist fanatics. Imagine one of them ever saying something like that.
It doesn't look like or quack like a duck...
Nor did the fact that Biggs served the U.S. in a combat capacity, obtaining two purple hearts, mean anything to the zero-service-history judge.
But no matter. Biggs got 17 years and his co-defendant, Zachary Rehl, got 15 years, and the big Proud Boy ranking above both of them, Enrique Tarrio, can pretty well predict what he's going to get from Kelly when he gets sentenced next month. He wasn't in town on that day because he was complying with another court order but that won't count for anything with the judge. He'll get the max and since he has a Latino name, he can count on a slyly applied darked-skinned enhancement to his sentence such as leftists always give to any minority claiming fealty to President Trump.
It's all a textbook definition of a draconian punishment, which draws its definition from the classical era when the Emperor Draco imposed the same death penalty on petty thieves as he did on full blown murderers. It was so loathesome to the ancient Greeks it lasted less than 30 years. The human sense of fairness throughout the ages has always required that a punishment fit a crime.
But not to Kelly.
The sentence may have made the judge feel better, but the problem with draconian sentences are that they reduce public respect for the law, which he obviously doesn't possess much of, either. It's little different from blue-city governments which impose massive taxes on legal marijuana businesses to fill city coffers and then wonder why the black market has taken over the pot market same as if they had never legalized drugs.
Kelly made this ridiculous claim at the sentencing:
“What happened on Jan. 6 harmed an important American custom,” Judge Kelly said. “That day broke our tradition of peacefully transferring power, which is among the most precious things we had as Americans. Notice I said ‘had’ — we don’t have it anymore.”
Custom? Tradition? That's the same as "law"?
Not to normal people.
What we have really lost in this judicial travesty is fair and equal justice, which he's done his part to destroy.
The draconian sentence violates the whole Constitutional prohibition on cruel and unual punishment as well as equal treatment under the law. The problematic aspects are cited by this publication from the Federal Bar Association:
Equal treatment under the law and prohibitions against cruel and unusual punishments are two time-tested legal principles that retain their importance down to modern times. Nowhere are those precepts more important than in the enactment, the promulgation, and the administration of criminal law. Moreover, the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial also have been, and remain, of paramount importance.
After all, in that second category, we've seen crap like this:
A man in NY pled guilty to planning to kill me and only got 3 months.
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greeneрџ‡єрџ‡ё (@RepMTG) August 31, 2023
95% of Violent BLM/Antifa rioters had their charges dropped after causing $2 billion in damages to communities.
It’s time to try to change this. https://t.co/sjCU464Fl8
But rest assured: In Kelly's ace judicial reasoning, Biggs is the bad guy, the bigger danger to the republic, not these mere would-be assassins of actual congressmembers. Tell that to the people of Ecuador.
I truly hope this sentence will be thrown out on appeal and be replaced with something more proportionate to the crime. I especially want to see this judge's bad legal reasoning rebuked as incompetent. If it's not, then this is going to be standard and precedent -- unequal justice in sentencing, and one set of rules for conservative miscreants and another set for leftists. Wishing that is a tall order in these days, but it does highlight Mark Levin's call to clean out the Washington judiciary. The lunatic sentencing in this case is Exhibit A.
Image: Twitter screen shot