The January 6 Prosecutions Hit a Speed Bump
Two weeks ago, I wrote of the Department of Justice’s overreach respecting some of the hundreds of January 6 defendants. On Friday the D.C. Circuit clipped the department’s wings. I expect more such losses as time goes on and the Department must actually present evidence in contested trials.
The ploy of keeping in D.C. jails without bail some of the protestors who engaged in no specific violent acts at the Capitol until their cases can be heard was very obviously designed to compel them to plea bargain so they could return home to their families and jobs, and the three-judge panel wasn’t buying it. If you think that there is a partisan tinge to their decision, you’d be wrong, Judge Robert Wilkins was confirmed under Barack Obama; Judge Judith Rogers under Bill Clinton, and Judge George Katsas under Donald Trump. It was bipartisan.
The case made it to the Circuit Court upon appeal from a detention order by Judge Royce Lamberth (a senior judge first appointed to the bench by then-president Ronald Reagan). I mention the judicial appointment history of these judges as an antidote to the all-too-common implications that judges are always using the law to cover their personal political beliefs. Sometimes it appears they do. Other times -- like this one -- they are honestly applying the Constitution and law to the facts.
And they do so here in what was clearly the Department of Justice’s political effort to paint with a broad brush anyone who supported Trump on January 6 and to place unreasonable and unlawful burdens on those protestors in order to bolster overcharged crimes.
Read more: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/03/the_january_6_prosecutions_hit_a_speed_bump.html#ixzz6qQJ7jEoL
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