A federal judge on Friday sentenced two members of the Oath Keepers militia to less than four years in prison for seditious conspiracy, halting government efforts to impose lengthy sentences on members of the group for their role in the attack on the Capitol on September 6. January. , 2021.
The two men, David Moerschel and Joseph Hackett, who flew from Florida to join the Oath Keepers in Washington on January 6, were given three-year and three-and-a-half-year terms, respectively.
Judge Amit P. Mehta, who has presided over three separate Oath Keepers trials that have now concluded, departed from federal guidelines in his decisions in Federal District Court in Washington this week. Prosecutors had requested 12 years for Moerschel and 10 years for Hackett.
The prison terms stand in stark contrast to those Judge Mehta handed down last week to the group’s leader, Stewart Rhodes, and one of his deputies, Kelly Meggs. They received 18 years and 12 years, respectively. The judge leaned toward leniency with the lowest members of the Oath Keeper hierarchy. Two others convicted of seditious conspiracy were sentenced this week to no more than four and a half years in prison.
“The sentence must not be vindictive; it must not be such that it is unduly harsh simply for the sake of being harsh,” Judge Mehta said at the end of Mr. Moerschel’s hearing.
On the day of the riot, both Mr. Moerschel and Mr. Hackett marched in a “stack” formation led by Mr. Meggs, pushing their way past police officers and into the Capitol.
The two were also part of a group chat for members in Florida in which Mr. Rhodes repeatedly encouraged people to go to Washington to dispute the election results.
“We need to make those senators very uncomfortable with all of us a few hundred feet away,” Rhodes wrote to the group two weeks before Jan. 6.
Prosecutors stressed Friday that Moerschel had brought his own weapons with him before the riot, storing his AR-15 rifle and semi-automatic pistol among a cache of weapons members had amassed in Virginia a day earlier. They told the judge that they believed that Mr. Moerschel came to Washington ready to heed “the impulses of madmen” like Mr. Rhodes and Mr. Meggs, and that he was ready to take up arms in Washington if the Oath asked him. leaders or former President Donald J. Trump.
Judge Mehta found that each man’s conduct on January 6 amounted to an act of terrorism and applied an enhanced sentence that slightly increased their jail time.
However, he appeared to accept assurances on Friday that the two men had come to see their association with Oath Keepers as painfully misguided, fueled by strong and influential voices within the group and on conservative platforms and social media.
“Elections are not taken in a vacuum; we make decisions with the information available to us,” said Angela Halim, Mr. Hackett’s lawyer.
Handing down the Oath Keeper sentences this week, Judge Mehta repeatedly stressed that even those relatively young members of the group who had not directly engaged in violence with police had added to the chaos during the riot by descending on the Capitol as an organized militia. .
“When you act with others, the danger is greater than when you act alone,” he said. “When the act is against the government, it makes the conduct particularly dangerous.”