- Howard Richardson pleaded responsible before this year to assaulting police officers during the Jan. 6 assault.
- He entered restricted areas of the Capitol grounds and defeat an officer with a Trump flag.
- On Friday, he was sentenced to 46 months in jail, a $2,000 fine, and a few a long time of supervised release.
Howard C. Richardson, a 72-yr-aged from Pennsylvania, was sentenced Friday to just about 4 several years in jail for beating a police officer with a Trump flag during the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
Richardson, who pleaded responsible in April to a demand of assaulting a regulation enforcement officer, made his way to limited areas of the Capitol grounds during the riot that interrupted Congress as associates had been counting electoral votes similar to the 2021 presidential election, in accordance to a assertion released by the Department of Justice.
The Pennsylvania indigenous informed the FBI he was at the Capitol for the reason that he was “pissed off” about the 2020 presidential election and offended about alleged voter fraud, NBC documented. He marched by means of the crowd carrying a Trump flag as he handed officers hoping to keep the surge at bay.
“At about 1:38 p.m., Richardson was standing various ft away from the law enforcement line at the West Terrace with the flagpole,” the DOJ assertion read. “He raised it and forcefully swung it downward to strike an officer with the Metropolitan Police Section who was standing powering a steel barricade. Richardson then struck the officer two a lot more moments, using plenty of force to split the flagpole. Then, times afterwards, he joined other rioters in pushing a substantial metal indication into a line of regulation enforcement officers.”
The government’s sentencing memo indicated Richardson downplayed his participation in the attack, furnished phony information about his actions, and wrongly insisted he’d carried a “Again the Blue” flag, not a Trump flag, during the riot.
“Evidently unphased [sic] by the irony of utilizing a professional-law enforcement image to assault a law enforcement officer, Richardson manufactured this assertion even however the video footage obviously reveals his flag is a blue and pink “Trump” flag,” the memo read through.
At the sentencing, NBC reported, Richardson apologized for his actions, expressing he “lost [his] mood” and that there is “no justification” for what he did, but that he had expected a party and “celebration” mainly because he believed that the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential earn would be stopped.
“I have learned my lesson, your honor,” NBC noted Richardson reported. “I was heading down as a patriotic citizen to celebrate. … I just want to go back again to my lifetime.”
Richardson was requested to provide 46 months in jail and pay $2,000 in restitution, in accordance to the DOJ statement about the sentencing. Subsequent his release, Richardson will be positioned on 3 decades of supervised release.
Richardson is just one of much more than 860 folks who have been arrested for crimes linked to the Jan. 6 breach of the US Capitol, together with much more than 260 people billed with assaulting or impeding regulation enforcement.
