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WASHINGTON, April 11 (AP) — A retired firefighter who threw a fire extinguisher at police officers during a riot at the U.S. Capitol was sentenced Tuesday to more than four years in prison.
On January 6, 2021, as Robert Sanford stormed the Capitol with a group of Donald Trump supporters, he threw a fire extinguisher and hit two police officers in the head. He also threw an orange traffic cone at a police officer at the Capitol.
“Sanford also abused Lower West Mesa law enforcement officers, calling them traitors,” prosecutor Janani Iyengar wrote in a court filing.
One police officer who was hit by a fire extinguisher had a swollen head; another suffered a headache and went to a hospital for a medical, prosecutors said.
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U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman sentenced Sanford to four years and four months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release, according to online court records. Federal prosecutors recommended a sentence of five years and 11 months in prison.
Sanford, 57, of Boothwain, Pennsylvania, was a firefighter for 26 years before retiring in 2020. The fire extinguisher was “a tool with which he was very familiar and should have known how much damage it could cause,” prosecutors wrote.
Sanford traveled to Washington, D.C., with friends from Pennsylvania on a bus trip organized by the conservative activist group Turning Point USA. He listened to a speech at Trump’s “Stop the Stealing” rally, then joined a crowd that marched to the Capitol and disrupted a joint session of Congress to demonstrate Democrat Joe Biden’s electoral victory over Trump.
Sanford was arrested on January 14, 2021. He has been in custody since pleading guilty last September to assaulting, resisting or obstructing police with a dangerous weapon – a felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.
Defense attorney Andrew Stewart said Sanford began working with cult anti-programming experts in August 2022 and faced charges over the baseless conspiracy theory that Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election from Trump. “fact”.
“Even after his incarceration, he participated in regular discussions designed to challenge his ideology and belief structures, and then help him understand how and why he formed the decisions that led him to the January 6th belief,” Stewart said in a court filing
Sanford believes officers attacked him and others without provocation when he picked up and threw what appeared to be an empty fire extinguisher, his attorney said.
“Of course, this was not a reason for his actions, nor was it intentional,” Stewart wrote.
More than 1,000 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the Jan. 6 riots. More than 600 of them have pleaded guilty or been convicted after trials by jury or judge. Of these, more than 450 were sentenced, more than half of whom received sentences ranging from seven days to 10 years in prison.
More than 100 police officers were injured during the riots on 6 January. (Associated Press)
(This is an unedited and auto-generated story from a Syndicated News feed, the content body may not have been modified or edited by LatestLY staff)
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