Investigating January 6th Capitol Riot Cases
Federal judges have shown leniency to Trump supporters: how do we know that?
Three years after the rioting on the steps of the Capitol and invasion of the halls of Congress by thousands of Donald Trump believers, James Risen and I at The Intercept analyzed the results of the 719 criminal cases that had finally resulted in a judge’s sentencing decision.
Our analysis showed that the judges of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where all January 6th cases have been prosecuted, have overwhelmingly issued sentences far more lenient than Justice Department prosecutors sought.
Our findings deflate the narrative of right-wing media that the Jan. 6 defendants — now at 1,247, according to the Associated Press — are akin to “hostages” of a liberal DC court.
We wrote:
“Trump and his allies have repeatedly claimed that the federal judicial system has been unnecessarily punitive in its treatment of January 6 defendants, complaining that they are “political prisoners” who have been unfairly persecuted for trying to prevent the congressional certification of Biden’s 2020 election. One leading January 6 defendant compared himself to a Jew living in Nazi Germany and said that his “only crime is opposing those who are destroying our country.”
In fact, the January 6 defendants have been treated more leniently than the Justice Department wanted.
These conclusions did not come from a quick review of numbers. It was the culmination of three years gathering data every day on the arrests, charges, court dockets, plea agreements, trials, convictions and sentencing decisions, along with media coverage and citizen investigations of the cases.
The sentencing facet of the story became possible when the U.S. Department of Justice started to publish an interesting document on sentences, almost hidden from view within its voluminous and often confusing web pages on the January 6 prosecutions.
Start with a spreadsheet
On January 7, 2021, I knew there would be hundreds of criminal cases in the D.C. court. I started a spreadsheet, with rows for each name of a person charged and columns of categories of information I thought I would need, such criminal charge, residence, age, and gender.
Months later, of course, I would find some of the columns useless, and the need to add additional columns for what I did need. And the rows kept growing; it turned out to be a task too big for one data nerd, and I often fell behind except for keeping the most basic information current and correct.
I did not publish my spreadsheet online as others pursuing the same goal have done (see below) for several reasons, including lack of resources to fact check every cell of information. My purpose was finding a story for my employers before publishing data for other journalists to use. That’s show biz.
My spreadsheet came to fill these columns for the now-1,241 named defendants:
LastName FirstName AKAs and Social Media Highest Charge Level(Felony/Misdemeanor) NewsLink(clips) DOJLink(DOJ press release) CASE#s Sex Race Age Charges Complaint/Affidavit(court documents from PACER) Indictment/Information(court documents from PACER) AllegedGroup(affiliation) Military/Veteran Law Enforcement StageOfCase (with dates and documents) Case Status(Plea/Guilty/Acquitted/Dismissed) Sentence Judge and NOTES
Where do I get this information? First choice is official court filings, found in every case from the U.S. District Court PACER database, or — if other users have bought the document first — free from CourtListener’s RECAP service.
As I described in a previous post, here’s the info on finding federal court records:
How to follow cases in federal court
We used PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) for searching dockets and downloading court filings. You need a (free) account to search for records. Then there are fees for printing results and downloading documents. Why? These are public federal court records and we have already paid our government taxes!
A Solution to the (Absurd) Expense of Federal Court Records
Courtlistener and RECAP are projects of the Free Law Project that provide free access to federal court dockets and documents that other RECAP users have downloaded. Use Courtlistener to look up cases and view dockets and download documents. If you add the RECAP extension to your Chrome browser, dockets and documents you have had to pay for will be added to the database so that they will be free to other searchers.
Department of Justice Data on January 6th Cases
The other source of official data on the cases is from the prosecution at the Department of Justice. The site which purports to show all the cases (it doesn’t) was recently redesigned, in my opinion, not for the better.
Catch the typo yet?
Sometimes the entries include links to the documents, sometimes not. In order to see the charges, it says to “See Documents.” But the documents are not linked. You’ll need to go to PACER, but try CourtListener first.
On the main page again, however, you will find the elusive sentencing document. It’s a pdf you’ll need to download. And you’ll also see the FBI Most Wanted List for January 6th, if you’re a Sedition Hunter.
The sentencing document is 84 pages long, as of January 5, 2024. It doesn’t include the name of the sentencing judge. So to find that, another trip to PACER or CourtListener to find the judge in the criminal (not the magistrate) docket. You’ll need to look up each defendant to find the judge.
Jim and I were able to work on the story from this document, which showed what the prosecution recommended, and what the judge decided. We looked at whether the judge chose to give less, more or the same as the prosecution asked. Then we also found which president appointed the judges.
To see full chart, go back to our story. The key will show the codes for the political party and for “less,” “more,” and “same.”
More sources of January 6th information and data
To be sure, I am not the only journalist or citizen activist who has been following the January 6th cases as a job or an individual pursuit. And I have been collaborating with others, in particular with The [Political Violence] Prosecution Project — a research platform tracking criminal cases involving illegal political violence occurring in the United States since 1990 — in gathering data which provided the background for the analysis.
The Prosecution Project makes their January 6th data freely available online here. You can see that they collect different/additional values than I do and also include the (few) cases on January 6th where offenders were charged in local DC court.
Other sources of information on the January 6th cases include:
Associated Press interactive: “Track the legal paths of the people arrested in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol attack”
NPR: The Jan. 6 attack: The cases behind the biggest criminal investigation in U.S. history
USA Today: Capitol riot arrests: See who's been charged across the U.S.
George Washington University Capitol Siege: last updated November 2023
Sedition Hunters Perp Sheet