A far-right activist was sentenced in Washington on Monday to more than seven years in prison for participating in the assault on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021, the harshest sentence ever handed down to date.
Guy Refitt, 49, a member of the “Three Percenters” group, was found guilty in March, in particular, of obstructing the work of Congress and the police, after the first trial dedicated to this attack. At the head of the first group that attacked the Congress headquarters, he had helped force the police lines, equipped according to prosecutors with a pistol, a bulletproof vest, a helmet and plastic handcuffs.
After being gassed, he withdrew as hundreds of Donald Trump supporters sowed violence and chaos inside the Capitol, delaying the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
“I didn’t go in, but I helped start the fire,” the Texas-born oil industry employee later bragged in a video.
“The traitors, we kill them”
When he returned to Wylie, near Dallas, he had threatened his two children to prevent them from reporting him to the police. “Traitors, we kill you,” he said in a recorded conversation transmitted to the FBI by his 19-year-old son, Jackson.
During the trial, the prosecution relied on numerous videos showing him, in the front row, haranguing the crowd and calling him a “leader”. Judging that his actions fall under federal “terrorism” laws, prosecutors then demanded a harsh 15-year prison sentence. His lawyers asked for two years in prison, pointing out that he had not entered the Capitol and had not committed violence.
Judge Dabney Friedrich retained an intermediate sentence of seven years and three months in prison. He called his actions “the antithesis of democracy,” but refused to stray too far from the sentences handed down so far, the most serious being five years and three months in prison.
Source: BFM TV
