A federal judge on Friday agreed to toss the convictions of four Proud Boys who attacked the Capitol in 2021, fulfilling a Justice Department request to clear some of the last remaining cases in the wake of President Donald Trump’s mass pardons of Jan.6 rioters.Subscribe to read this story ad-freeGet unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.U.S.
District Judge Timothy J.Kelly granted the motion to dismiss the convictions against Ethan Nordean, Joseph Biggs, Zachary Rehl and Dominic Pezzola with prejudice, meaning the case is permanently closed.Kelly, who was appointed by Trump in 2017, wrote that while the federal government can request that a case be vacated, he did not approve of the administration’s move here.“Because the decisions to issue the Executive Order and to abandon this prosecution—even after the Government secured convictions for serious crimes relating to the attack on the Capitol on January 6—are solely the Executive’s, no one should mistake the Court’s granting of the Government’s motion for its agreement with those decisions,” he wrote.Kelly indicated that he could not sustain the case once the Justice Department declined to maintain its prosecution of the defendants.“Indeed, it is hard to see how any course other than granting the motion in full could make practical sense,” he wrote.
“Denying the motion would not somehow revive the convictions that the Court of Appeals vacated.Nor would denying it mean a retrial would follow, because the Court lacks the authority to compel the Executive to pursue a prosecution, full stop.”On his first day back in office last year, Trump issued approximately 1,500 full pardons to people convicted in connection with the attack on the Capitol, while granting commutations to 14 others.
Those 14 sentences were reduced to time served but were not dismissed outright by the courts.Nordean, Biggs, Rehl and Pezzola were among the 14 whose sentences were commuted by Trump.The f...