US Capitol attack: first defendant in 6 January riot expected to be sentenced | US Capitol breach

Three years probation, 40 hours of community service, and $ 500.

That’s the sentence federal prosecutors sought for the first Capitol rioter expected to face trial, Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a 49-year-old Donald Trump supporter from Indiana.

“Best day ever. We stormed the Capitol,” Morgan-Lloyd wrote on Facebook on Jan. 6, prosecutors said, adding that she and her friend were “in the top 50,” authorities said.

With nearly 500 people arrested and charged for their roles in the January 6 attack, the conviction of Morgan-Lloyd, a grandmother from a small Indiana town with no known links to extremist groups, will be the first clue as to which Kind of verdicts there are Federal judges can impose on the hundreds of people who entered the Capitol during the official confirmation of Trump’s loss in the 2020 presidential election.

While some members of extremist groups are charged with aggravated conspiracies and others charged with assaulting law enforcement officers for allegedly planning the violence in the Capitol in advance, many defendants, like Morgan-Lloyd, are charged only with misdemeanor.

Morgan-Lloyd has agreed to plead guilty to a single charge of “parade, demonstrating or picketing a Capitol,” which carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison and is due to be convicted by a federal judge on Wednesday afternoon.

Protesters break through barricades to enter the Capitol. Photo: Bloomberg / Getty Images

In a condemnation memo, federal prosecutors said that Morgan-Lloyd and her friend Donna Sue Bissey were in a Capitol hallway for a little over 10 minutes, that they did not commit any acts of violence or destroy government property, and that they appeared not to have planned their actions in advance or having coordinated with extremist groups.

In a letter to the court, prosecutors said the 49-year-old had taken responsibility for her actions and wrote: “It didn’t dawn on me at first, but later I realized that if every person like me, who isn’t violent, is out removed from this crowd, those who have been violent may have lost the nerve to do what they did. “

Having no previous convictions, Morgan-Lloyd was quick to admit her participation and cooperate with law enforcement and later regretted what she had done, prosecutors wrote in a conviction memo that they felt it was appropriate not to request a prison sentence for Morgan-Lloyd, only one extended probationary period, community service, and $ 500 in compensation for the nearly $ 1.5 million damage the Capitol sustained during the invasion.

“I think she learned a lot,” Morgan-Lloyd’s attorney Heather Shaner told the Guardian. “This was a trauma to her, and she knows it was a trauma to the United States of America that people did what they did and she would never do it again.”

Shaner said her client “was from a very small town and had very limited lifelong exposure” and that she believed that many of the people who participated in the Capitol Riots were “uninformed or misinformed”.

“She’s a very fine woman and I hope she gets parole,” Shaner said.

Prosecutors wrote that Morgan-Lloyd was incarcerated “approximately two days” after her first arrest in February and that time in the criminal justice system is likely to be “eye-opening” and a deterrent to future criminal behavior.

Prosecutors said that the terms of her probation should include a ban on possession of firearms.

Unlike most federal defendants, who normally remain in custody prior to trial, the vast majority of defendants in the Capitol Riots have already been released, according to a Guardian analysis. The stark contrast in pre-trial detention rates has raised the question of whether the predominantly white Capitol defendants were treated differently by prosecutors and judges than most federal defendants who are black and Latino.