Department of Justice abruptly drops charges against 129 Trump inauguration protesters
Just in time for this year's protests.
Department of Justice abruptly drops charges against 129 Trump inauguration protesters
A quiet surrender at 5:30 p.m.
Alan Pyke
Jan 18, 2018, 6:04 pm Updated: Jan 18, 2018, 6:27 pm
Federal prosecutors are dropping felony rioting charges against 129 of the nearly 200 people they have spent a year pursuing in cases stemming from a protest that turned violent on Inauguration Day last year.
The news came late Thursday in an email from representatives of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. Prosecutors will continue to pursue cases against 59 others from the march, the email said.
“This is a victory, but the fight is far from over,” Sam Menefee-Libey, one of several activists and legal support volunteers helping defendants in the case, said in a statement on the decision. “The US Attorney’s office continues to zealously prosecute many who were protesting a proto-fascist president and the solidarity among defendants and supporters remain strong. We will keep fighting until everyone is free.”
In December, a jury refused to convict any of the first six defendants in the riot case on any of the charges the feds brought. The case centered on reams of video from the protest, showing a crowd of between 300 and 500 people mostly dressed in black marching through parts of downtown Washington, D.C., last January.
Prosecutors acknowledged they had no evidence any of the six had personally smashed a window, thrown a rock, or clashed with police, but asked jurors to hold the entire group of marchers criminally responsible for the destructive actions of a handful. They pursued charges that could have conferred maximum sentences of roughly 60 years in prison.
Judge Lynn Leibovitz took the extraordinary step of striking one of the original eight charges from the case herself after the prosecution rested, signalling the feds had failed to provide sufficient evidence to support it even under the most generous interpretation of what was presented in Leibovitz’s court.
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https://thinkprogress.org/feds-drop-129-inauguration-riot-charges-e331fc34935b/
