In sentencing a Jan. 6 defendant, Michael Foy, today, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected federal prosecutors' request for a sentence at the top of Foy's federal sentencing guidelines. There was a commonality that she discerned in the Jan. 6 defendants who have appeared before her.
Chutkan acknowledged that the day seemed to be an aberration for Foy...
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The judge added that Foy’s story was a familiar one among Jan. 6 defendants: people, particularly in the time of strict Covid lockdowns, who found “community, connection and a purpose” in protesting the 2020 election results.
COVID fucked people up in the head, not just the body. It was literally unique in human history. All of a sudden this plague hits and all human social activity ceases. It was surreal. I went from being in a jury trial that ended on the Wednesday before the Monday when the courts dead closed. I live on a densely populated island of 80,000 people, part of a metropolitan area of 2.6 million. My condo is right off one of only two main arteries that connect to the mainland. That artery becomes 41st Street on Miami Beach and except for the middle of the night and especially during normal hours, a person wouldn't last five seconds alive standing in the middle of 41st Street. After we went on lockdown I went out at a normal hour, 7 p.m. or so, and 41st Street was deserted. For the absence of traffic, motorized and pedestrian, it was a post-apocalyptic landscape--because it was. It was bewildering and disorienting.
Crime spiked after the lockdowns were lifted and people went back to "community, connection and purpose". The crime was normal and it was also weird. People weren't the same, not even criminal people. I remember thinking, "Did COVID fuck with our heads?", not the disease, but the unique conditions the disease forced us to live under. I can't remember now the specific criminal incidents that I remember as being weird then. I do remember one quasi-criminal incident: the LeBron James-Isaiah Stewart brawl. Have you ever seen another human being so weirdly violent as Stewart? (I hope not.) But I didn't know who Stewart was then. It was LeBron who was weird to me. Whatever that was, that backhand punch, accidental swipe, it was weird, it was just not LeBron. Lance Stevenson blowing in his face, Draymond Green kicking him in the groin, 'Bron didn't react like that, in that whip-like manner.
Judge Chutkan has seen a lot of Jan. 6 defendants, and she has seen a common “community, connection and purpose” weirdness in them. She doesn't excuse this dickhead's behavior, she sentenced him to 40 months in federal prison, but she recognizes that people just weren't the same in the head then. Not criminal defendants, not most if not all of us. COVID really fucked us up.
