Hundreds of rioters accused of nonviolent crimes during the attack on the Capitol have wrapped up their cases. Here’s what some of their lives look like now.
In the past four years, nearly 1600 people have been prosecuted in connection with the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Some were accused of felonies such as assault or seditious conspiracy and are still in prison. But hundreds charged with lesser crimes have wrapped up their cases and returned to their lives.
January 6 was a turning point for everyone involved. In breaching the Capitol, a mob of Trump loyalists caused millions of dollars in damage, injured more than 140 police officers and, for the first time in US history, chased lawmakers away from their duty to certify a presidential election.
The attack also prompted the largest single investigation the Justice Department has ever undertaken, leading to arrests in all 50 states. Ever since, the defendants have been held to account in Washington’s federal courthouse, blocks away from the Capitol itself, for their roles in undermining a bedrock of democracy, the peaceful transfer of power.
While some have come to regret their actions on that day, others do not. At best, they say they have seen the realities of the criminal justice system, becoming more sympathetic to the plights of others facing prosecution. At worst, they remain convinced that the system treated them unfairly, hardened by their brushes with the law.
The judges who have overseen Capitol riot cases have routinely pushed back on that idea.
“I have been shocked to watch some public figures try to rewrite history, claiming rioters behaved ‘in an orderly fashion’ like ordinary tourists, or martyrising convicted Jan. 6 defendants as ‘political prisoners’ or even, incredibly, ‘hostages,’” Judge Royce C. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, said in court last year. “That is all preposterous.”
Still, President-elect Donald Trump has promised to pardon many, maybe most, of the rioters as soon as he takes office and could shut down the broad investigation into the Capitol attack. Here are the experiences of some defendants accused of relatively minor crimes four years after January 6.
Casey Cusick
Casey Cusick didn’t know much about the federal criminal justice system before he was convicted of four misdemeanours for unlawfully entering the Capitol. Cusick, a 39-year-old car dealer from Tulsa, Oklahoma, says he now understands a little more about the cost of being held to account for his role in an attack that prosecutors say “threatened the peaceful transfer of power”.
He lost his small business as a handyman after his case was featured on the news. And, he says, he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal fees.
Cusick said he remained shocked by the harsh realities that accompany facing federal charges – everything from giving up his firearm and his passport when his case started to the conditions of the prison where he served his 10-day sentence.
“It changed my mind forever about the criminal justice system,” he said. “I’ll never look at the term ‘prisoner’ the same again.”
Eric Clark
On January 6, Eric Clark was three years sober and had more or less settled into a middle-class life as a machine operator in Louisville, Kentucky, after years of battling homelessness and drug addiction.
But the belief that Trump won the 2020 election led him to illegally enter the Capitol in a Guy Fawkes mask and refuse to leave for nearly 30 minutes. Clark was sentenced to five months in prison. Now 48, he is working on a drywall cleanup crew, trying to put his life back together.
His one great success, he said, is the relationship he has rebuilt with his daughter – even though it was she who turned him in to authorities to begin with.
“Instead of being mad at her,” he said, “I’ve chosen to accept that she has her viewpoint and I have mine.”
Couy Griffin
Not much in Griffin’s life is the same as it was before he was found guilty of illegally climbing over walls in the restricted grounds of the Capitol and sentenced to 14 days in prison.
He used to own a restaurant. Now, he says, he repairs golf carts. He once served as a commissioner in Otero County, New Mexico, but two years ago, he was removed from office under the 14th Amendment. That made him the first public official in more than a century to be barred from serving under a constitutional ban on insurrectionists holding office.
Still, his enthusiasm for Trump remains undimmed.
“It’s been difficult,” he said. “But I believe that the people who support me and know me, their support has only grown stronger.”
Treniss Evans
Evans said he wasn’t all that interested in politics before the 2020 election. He has become steeped in the subject since January 6, when he stepped through a broken Capitol window and used a megaphone to lead other rioters in the Pledge of Allegiance and national anthem.
Evans, who is 50 and lives near San Antonio, was sentenced to 20 days in prison after pleading guilty to entering the Capitol’s restricted grounds. Like other rioters, he emerged from the experience focused less on his own culpability than on the larger travails of being subject to criminal prosecution.
In the past four years, he has spent much of his time on a group he founded, Condemned USA, which provides legal support and public advocacy to hundreds of others who took part in the Capitol attack.
“I used to believe in our judicial system,” he said, “but now I see what generations upon generations of minorities and people of lower income have been complaining about.”
James Beeks
When James Beeks went to Washington on January 6 with the Oath Keepers militia, his chosen profession distinguished him from many of his compatriots in the far-right group, which played a central role in breaching the Capitol. Beeks was a five-time Broadway performer reprising the part of Judas in the 50th-anniversary production of Jesus Christ Superstar.
After being accused in a conspiracy indictment of forcibly entering the Capitol in a military-style “stack” with other Oath Keepers, Beeks was found not guilty by a judge who ruled that the evidence did not support the charges.
He was one of only two of the dozens of January 6 defendants who have gone to trial and been fully acquitted. But despite being cleared in the case, he said, his life has not gone back to normal.
He is living in a friend’s van in Florida, finishing a book about his experience, I Am Judas Redeemed. He has not returned to the stage since his arrest.
“I still have this J6 scarlet letter on my chest,” he said.
Daniel Christmann
Daniel Christmann was 38 when he was arrested on misdemeanour charges after entering the Capitol on January 6 through a broken window. At the time, Christmann, who lives in New York City, had worked as a plumber and an activist journalist and had run for public office in New York.
Working with his defence lawyers during his prosecution so inspired him that he returned to school after serving his 25-day sentence. He expects to graduate in May from St Joseph’s College in New York City’s Brooklyn borough. And now, at 42, he is applying to law school and wants to be a lawyer who can battle what he sees as the excesses of the Government – not unlike the federal defender who first came to his aid, he said.
“I just felt like what went on in my case was so bizarre and unjust that I knew we needed more fighters like her,” Christmann said.
Jenna Ryan
Jenna Ryan was a real estate broker and social media influencer in the Dallas area when she entered the Capitol on January 6, praying and chanting “Fight for Trump!” with a crowd in the Rotunda.
The next day, she posted a message on Twitter, saying: “We just stormed the Capitol. It was one of the best days of my life.”
All of that ultimately led to a 60-day prison term. She claims that she was treated harshly because of her “public profile” as a January 6 defendant. But being sentenced for illegally demonstrating in the Capitol also allowed her to fulfil what she describes as her “lifelong goal of being a writer and a speaker”.
Ryan, 54, has written a book called Storming the Capitol: My Truth About January 6th, which she says “shows how it feels to be caught in the middle of a polarised political climate, cancelled by society, surveilled by the FBI and thrown in prison for a tweet”.
Jacob Chansley
Few people are more visibly associated with the Capitol attack than Jacob Chansley, the so-called QAnon Shaman, who entered the building in face paint and a horned headdress while brandishing an American flag on a spear-tipped flagpole.
Moving with the first wave of rioters, he left a threatening note on the Senate floor for Vice-President Mike Pence, who had to be hustled to safety as the mob overwhelmed the Capitol.
Yet, like others who disrupted the election certification that day, Chansley seeks to cast the 41-month sentence he received as “experiencing tyranny firsthand”. Even after his release, he maintains January 6 was “a setup” by the Government and that public officials and the news media have painted him as a “villain and a terrorist”.
Still, Chansley, 37, said his day-to-day life in Phoenix creating art remains much the same as before that day – “other than I get more interviews now”.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alan Feuer
Photographs by: Desiree Rios, Zack Wittman, Natalie Keyssar, September Dawn Bottom, Justin Hamel, Christopher Lee, David Kasnic, Adriana Zehbrauskas and Erin Schaff
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