Photo: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
For: The opinion Updated 07 Jan 2023, 18:00 pm EST
One of the first raiders followers of donald trump in entering the United States Capitol On January 6, 2021, he was sentenced to 46 months behind bars two years after that event, according to CNN.
In handing down the sentence against Jerod Wade Hughes, US District Judge Timothy Kelly called the events of January 6 a “national shame” and noted that the mob “broke our previously unbroken tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. We can’t get her back after that.”
“It’s hard not to become numb now, after two years,” Judge Kelly said of the events of January 6 during sentencing, “not to let, as time goes on, the gravity of the situation fade away.”
Jerod Wade Hughes pleaded guilty in August to obstructing an official proceeding. According to his plea agreement, Hughes was the eighth assailant to enter the Capitol, climbing through a broken window.. He then helped another kick in the door of the Senate wing, his plea agreement says, allowing more assailants to enter and it marked the first major breach in the building.
According to prosecutor Emily Allen, Hughes sent text messages to others after the attack on the Capitol saying that if they had more participants they could have occupied the building, messages Kelly called “chilling.”
Citing one of Hughes’s messages after the riots, Justice Kelly said that “we would have been in a constitutional crisis if what you wanted had happened.”
Hughes’ defense attorney, Jonathan Zucker, argued that Hughes “was not motivated by the normal factors. He genuinely believed that he was acting like a patriot” and his actions represented a “misguided attempt to perform a civic good”.
Hughes was behind other rioters who chased Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman down the stairs near the Senate chamber, according to the plea agreement. He then confronted a line of police officers in the building, Allen said, “screaming with venom” at the officers while the senators were “only a few feet away.”
Hughes eventually made his way to the Senate chamber and sorted through the papers on the senators’ abandoned desks, videos of the event show.
“I want to put this behind me and go back to my family,” Hughes told Kelly before he was sentenced. He also apologized to “my country, Congress, the police,” and specifically Officer Goodman.
Hughes’ brother, Joshua, who drove with Hughes and was with him during the attack, was sentenced in November to 38 months behind bars.
It may interest you:
– Biden honored the defenders of democracy on January 6: “History will remember their names”
– The US Attorney General summarizes the investigations carried out on the second anniversary of the assault on the Capitol
– Jan. 6 committee documents reveal warnings of possible violence ahead of Capitol attack