A federal judge on July 10 granted the Justice Department’s (DOJ) motion to dismiss the convictions of four Proud Boys members over their roles in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol breach.
In a seven-page memorandum, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly said he would throw out the case against Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl, and Dominic Pezzola, finding that the court had no grounds to deny the government’s motion to dismiss it with prejudice.
“There is little mystery about why the government is moving to dismiss this case, or whether dismissal is in fact what the executive seeks,” the judge wrote.
“President [Donald] Trump’s views about the prosecution of those who attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6–whether those views are based on fact or fiction—are well known, as is his intention to extend clemency to them through the executive order.”
According to court documents, all four defendants had been convicted of “serious crimes” related to the breach of the Capitol, including seditious conspiracy, conspiracy to prevent an officer from discharging their duties, obstruction of law enforcement during a civil order, and destruction of government property.
Pezzola was not convicted of seditious conspiracy but was found guilty of the other charges, as well as assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers, robbery of U.S. personal property, and destruction of government property for breaking a window.
He was captured on video using a Capitol Police officer’s riot shield to break a window at the Capitol as a joint session of Congress was preparing to certify the election, in which Democratic candidate Joe Biden beat Trump.
The memorandum added that the window break caused “the first entry point through which hundreds of rioters streamed into the building,” which resulted in Congress pausing efforts to certify the election results and going into lockdown.
When Trump entered office for his second term, he signed an executive order commuting the sentences of Nordean, Biggs, Rehl, and Pezzola and also granted a full pardon to hundreds of others associated with the Capitol breach.
“Indeed, it is hard to see how any course other than granting the motion in full could make practical sense,” Kelly wrote in the memo on Friday.
“Denying the motion would not somehow revive the convictions that the Court of Appeals vacated. Nor would denying it mean a retrial would follow, because the Court lacks the authority to compel the Executive to pursue a prosecution, full stop.”
Kelly suggested that he did not want anyone to mistake the granted motion for the court agreeing with Trump’s decision to pardon people charged with crimes related to January 6.
“All that said, because the decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s,” Kelly said.
