Four men were convicted Tuesday of assaulting or obstructing police officers in some of the most violent attacks of the January 6, 2021 siege at the U.S. Capitol, including one in which a DC officer was nailed to a door and another in which an officer was dragged down steps and beaten with sticks and sticks.
Three of the men were convicted in a trial before U.S. District Judge Trevor N. McFadden, but other charges against them were dropped, leaving McFadden the first federal judge in Washington to acquit mob members of felony charges. He discovered that while all three were fighting the police, only one was clearly intent on obstructing Congress as it met to confirm President Biden’s election victory.
In another case, a fourth man pleaded guilty to assault.
The lower west terrace of the Capitol was the site of some of the worst violence on January 6, when police charged into the crowd unaware that other entrances to the Capitol had already been breached. The officers testified at the trial about a slow and steady advance of the rioters which they succeeded in thwarting at great cost for 2 and a half hours. They suffered bruises, contusions and broken bones; one was forced into medical retirement.
Patrick E. McCaughey III of Ridgefield, Conn., used a riot shield to pin D.C. police officer Daniel Hodges to the tunnel door, McFadden found, and hit another officer in the hand. Tristan C. Stevens of Pensacola, Fla., tried to engage the group in coordinated pushes and personally pushed Capitol Police Sgt. Aquilino Gonell with another riot shield. David Mehaffie of Kettering, Ohio, led mob members in and out of the tunnel.
All three argued they were just caught between violent protesters and police, an argument McFadden rejected as “implausible”.
The police remember being attacked with their own riot shields on January 6
The defendants “knew what was going on,” he said, and were part of “shocking violence … no police officer should have had to endure.”
Separately, on Tuesday, Jack Wade Whitton of Locust Grove, Ga., pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan to assaulting police with a dangerous weapon at the same Capitol entrance about an hour ago later. He admitted kicking, punching and throwing objects, told police, “You’re going to die tonight,” and dragged a DC officer identified as BM down the stairs to be beaten by other rioters.
Whitton, 32, faces a maximum statutory sentence of 20 years in prison at the March 6 sentencing before Sullivan, or roughly five to eight years under federal sentencing guidelines set out in a plea agreement.
In the case of the three who faced trial, McFadden agreed that McCaughey, 25, used a riot shield as a dangerous weapon against Hodges, causing “significant pain and extensive bruising”. But he found that in other attacks on police, McCaughey and Stevens used shields in ways that could not cause serious harm.
“I don’t think a shield is inherently a dangerous weapon,” he said. McFadden said he found no support for Gonell’s testimony that Stevens, 26, also attacked with a police baton.
The testimony of Gonell and Hodges was “more that of the victims than typical law enforcement,” McFadden said, potentially colored by their “understandable anger and resentment” toward the rioters. But he said he believed any inaccurate recollection by the officers was unintentional and that their testimony was largely supported by video evidence.
McCaughey and Mehaffie, on the other hand, both “shadowed their testimony” to help each other “more … than the facts allowed,” McFadden found.
Testifying in his own defense, Mehaffie, 63, said he was pushed into police lines by the overwhelming force of the crowd and shouted “Don’t hurt the police!” and had to fight his way out of the tunnel. In the video, he can be heard shouting: “Push! Push! Don’t throw things!” He said he was trying to control the conflict as the crowd advanced and played a negotiating role, telling police: “If we don’t push, you won’t push.”
“There was no negotiation,” DC police officer Abdulkadir Abdi said earlier. “His goal was to get into the Capitol and we were pretty much in his way.”
Mehaffie struggled to explain why, if his goal was to avoid confrontation, he pounded on the glass doors, told other rioters to scale the walls for “battle,” helped pass a shield riot police forward and stayed in the tunnel.
“I don’t know if I had any expectations except to keep moving,” he declared.
McCaughey testified that he backed off when Hodges started yelling, showing that he had no desire to do harm. McFadden said Hodges’ “heartbreaking screams of pain” appeared to have inspired a “moment of humanity” in McCaughey, but that his earlier actions “cannot be undone by his subsequent kindness.”
The judge found that only McCaughey was trying to stop the vote count, based on comments he made to friends and police, while Mehaffie and Stevens’ motives for trying to enter the Capitol were unclear. Prosecutors argued that his intent could be inferred from his assault.
“They were absolutely determined to get into the United States Capitol building that day, regardless of what was in front of them,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Jocelyn Bond said in closing arguments in the trial. “They put their words behind it, they put their actions behind it.”
Stevens did not testify; his lawyer Lauren Cobb argued at the end that he used the riot shield to protect himself from police batons. He said he only “snapped” at an officer when he was pushed from behind.
“The only plausible explanation” for Steven’s behaviour, which included cursing and spitting at officers, was that he wanted to join in the attack, the judge said.
McFadden said there was less evidence of intent to disrupt Congress in this case than in the previous Jan. 6 trials he oversaw. But he is also skeptical of defense claims that the three men only wanted to express opinions. “They demonstrated outside. They have been demonstrating all day. Why go to such lengths, why hurt multiple agents just to get in and manifest inside? It doesn’t pass the laugh test,” he said.
McFadden noted that two officers said they were more reluctant to use force at the Capitol on Jan. 6 because of the Black Lives Matter movement and racial justice demonstrations the previous summer. The judge, however, blamed political leaders and the rioters, saying the trial showed “the chaos and violence that can occur when senior government leaders do not support law enforcement” and suggested that the police should have been more aggressive. and had more support on January 6.
McCaughey, Mehaffie and Stevens will be sentenced in January and face many possible penalties.
McCaughey was arrested after the verdict; McFadden said that after his “incredible” testimony, “I frankly do not trust that he will be sentenced again.”