Confrontational Denver activist sentenced to 12 years in prison in judicial threats case

A longtime Denver activist was sentenced to 12 years in prison Tuesday after pleading guilty to three felonies in connection with threatening actions he took against a Denver judge.

Denver District Court Judge Morris Hoffman sentenced Eric Brandt, 49, to four years on each of three counts of attempted retaliation against a judge, according to court records, with the sentences to run consecutively.

Brandt’s attorneys decried the sentence in a statement Wednesday.

“Mr. Brandt’s 12-year prison sentence is disproportionate to other sentences, even for violent offenses, suggesting the severity of the sentence is based on the status of the victims, namely, that the victims were judges,” attorneys Cassandra MacKenzie and Yona Porat said in the statement.

The charges stem from a 2019 incident in which Brandt called a Denver judge’s courtroom — apparently that of Denver County Court Judge Andre Rudolph — and said the judge should be “violently murdered,” according to the Denver District Attorney’s Office.

“It’s my prayer that some (expletive) actually does it,” he said during the phone call, which was broadcast on YouTube. “Kill, kill, kill. All judges should die.”

Brandt also called for a protest at the judge’s home and said the judge would “look best hanging from a tree,” according to the district attorney’s office.

He had faced between one and six years in prison on each felony.

Brandt has for years protested the court system and police along the Front Range, and has been charged with crimes almost 50 times since 2010, according to court records. After his arrests, he often later saw the charges dismissed or reduced in court. He was sometimes acquitted, and sometimes pleaded or was found guilty of minor crimes, receiving months-long jail sentences.

In 2015, Brandt and another man were charged with felony jury tampering after they set up a booth with a sign that said “Juror Info” outside Denver’s Lindsey-Flanigan Courthouse and passed out literature encouraging jury nullification — a practice in which a jury can reach a not guilty verdict because jurors believe a law is immoral or wrongly applied.

They were cleared of all wrongdoing in that case.

In 2017, Brandt pleaded guilty to attempting to influence a public servant in Adams County and was given a deferred threeyear prison sentence followed by probation.