Horowitz: J6 defendant convicted of charge that same DC court celebrates overturning during Vietnam War protests
https://www.theblaze.com/op-ed/horowitz-...am-war-protests
Daniel Horowitz
January 26, 2023

If you want evidence that January 6 defendants are all being punished based on their beliefs, not on what they actually did, nothing demonstrates the hypocrisy of the D.C. district court more than the exhibit displayed in the lobby headed toward the court’s own cafeteria.

Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man famously pictured with his feet up on Nancy Pelosi’s desk that fateful day, was convicted on Monday of four felonies and four misdemeanors by a jury that took only one hour to deliberate. The felony charges were not for touching Pelosi’s desk, but for vague actions like “obstructing an official proceeding” (Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1512( c )(2) and 2)) and obstructing law enforcement during a civil disorder (18 U.S.C. 231(a)(3)). Barnett was never even charged with committing a single act of violence, a point ceded by the Justice Department long ago. He also couldn’t have obstructed the official proceeding, because he didn’t enter the Capitol until after the proceedings were over. Yet he now faces up to 20 years in prison, pending his sentencing in May.

They don’t want you to see this … Big Tech does its best to limit what news you see. Make sure you see our stories daily — directly to your inbox.

One of the major felonies is the 231(a)(3) charge of obstructing an officer during a civil disorder. As I noted earlier this month, this statute at face value is unconstitutional because it ropes in protected assembly, speech, and protesting. Anyone caught talking to a cop during the course of a protest where someone might be charged for a crime could be on the hook for 231(a)(3), as was the case with Barnett. For years, in order to justify the constitutionality of this statute, federal courts have only applied it to individuals who were committing acts of violence. In 1976, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals (in United States v. Casper) established a sensible standard defining the scope of the crime as “the Defendant attempted to commit an act for the intended purpose of obstructing, impeding, or interfering, either by himself or with someone else, in a violent manner with such law enforcement officer or officers.”

Nobody has ever been charged with this felony without committing a violent act himself, even in the worst BLM/Antifa riots with widespread beating, looting, arson, and assaults on cops. This argument was made by Barnett’s attorneys, Joe McBride, Brad Geyer, and Carol Stewart, in a motion to dismiss. Yet in what has become standard in J6 cases, Judge Christopher Cooper sidelined all the legal norms and dug up a case from 1971 in a very different era, in which one defendant was hit with 231(a) without having committed a violent act. Judge Cooper cited in his opinion on the motion the case of famous Vietnam War protester Abbie Hoffman, who was charged under section 231(a)(3) for erecting a barricade to obstruct police during the 1971 May Day protests as precedent for plowing forward with this charge against Barnett.

Mind you, Barnett is not accused of anything as proactive as obstructing a barricade, but nonetheless, Cooper therefore concluded, “The Court thus declines Barnett’s invitation to adopt the Eighth Circuit’s apparent reading of the statute to require obstruction of an officer ‘in a violent manner.’”

The notion that we would revert to a premodern legal era of civil liberties jurisprudence is absurd and would never be applied to anyone else, certainly not to any protester on the left. But the biggest irony of all accentuating this two-tiered justice system is how Judge Cooper could shamelessly bring up Abbie Hoffman as a dangerous exception to free speech protections when an exhibit in this very courthouse – the E. Barrett Prettyman Federal Courthouse – lists among the court’s accomplishments that it overturned this very precedent that led to such convictions!

In a follow-up motion to dismiss following the final jury instructions before the close of the trial on January 19, Barnett’s lawyers noted the following:-- excerpt, rest at link above --