A federal judge knocked 15 months off a Capitol rioter’s seven-year sentence on Wednesday, the first resentencing under the Supreme Court’s decision to narrow the Justice Department’s key felony charge in its prosecution of Jan. 6, 2021 offenses, Courthouse News reports. Thomas Robertson, a former Virginia police officer, was sentenced to 87 months in May 2023 for planning with a fellow police officer to travel to the Capitol and engage in a “counterinsurgency” where he clashed with police while wielding a walking stick and taking selfies throughout the building. A federal jury convicted Robertson on six counts: obstruction of an official proceeding, civil disorder, entering a restricted building, disorderly conduct in a restricted building, disorderly conduct in the Capitol and witness tampering. U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ordered that Robertson’s prison term be shortened to 72 months, cutting it by a year and three months.
Robertson already has served about 14 of those 72 months. Cooper held the resentencing hearing to answer a series of questions raised by two appellate cases. First, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in Fischer v. United States narrowed the obstruction charge to explicit document destruction in the Capitol riot. The majority rejected the Justice Department’s argument that, while the charge was created after the Enron scandal, an “otherwise” clause allowed such unforeseen obstructive conduct as the Jan. 6 riot to fall under the statute. Second, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals panel found that a sentencing enhancement — interfering with the administration of justice — could apply to only judicial proceedings, not the congressional certification of the electoral votes. Before Wednesday's decision, federal prosecutor Elizabeth Aloi urged Cooper to reaffirm the 87-month sentence, arguing that even without the obstruction charge, the interference enhancement should apply to Robertson’s witness tampering charge because he destroyed the phone he used at the Capitol.
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