The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Capitol rioters enter 1st guilty pleas to assaulting law enforcement officers
A New Jersey gym owner and a Washington state man on Friday became the first people charged in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol to plead guilty to assaulting a law enforcement officer during the deadly siege.
The pair of plea deals with federal prosecutors could be a benchmark for dozens of other cases in which Capitol rioters are charged with attacking police as part of an effort to halt the certification of President Joe Biden’s election victory.
An attorney for Scott Kevin Fairlamb, a 44-year-old former mixed martial arts fighter who owned Fairlamb Fit gym in Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, said prosecutors are seeking a sentencing guideline range of about 31⁄2 to 41⁄4 years in prison. But the judge isn’t bound by that recommendation.
Later on Friday, the same judge in Washington, D.C., ordered Devlyn Thompson to be jailed in Seattle after he pleaded guilty to assaulting a police officer with a dangerous weapon, a baton. Thompson, 28, of Puyallup, Washington, had been free since his participation in the Capitol riot.
The pleas come less than two weeks after a group of police officers testified at a congressional hearing about their harrowing confrontations with the mob of insurrectionists. Five officers who were at the Capitol that day have died, four of them by suicide. The Justice Department has said that rioters assaulted approximately 140 police officers on Jan. 6. About 80 of them were U.S. Capitol Police officers and about 60 were from the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department.
Fairlamb, whose brother is a U.S. Secret Service agent, was one of the very first people to breach the Capitol after other rioters smashed windows using riot shields and kicked out a locked door, according to federal prosecutors. After leaving the building, Fairlamb harassed a line of police officers, shouting in their faces and blocking their progress through the mob, prosecutors wrote in a court filing.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Tejpal Chawla said Thompson was on the front lines of the most violent clashes that day, in a tunnel at the Capitol.
“This is one of the largest domestic terrorism events in U.S. history, where a group of individuals attacked the citadel of our constitutional democracy in an effort to overthrow the valid election results of the president of the United States,” Chawla said.
Thomas Durkin, one of Thompson’s attorneys, said Jan. 6 was a “horrible, horrible event” but disputed the prosecutor’s characterization of the attack.
“I think it’s dangerous to start throwing around ‘domestic terrorism’ in circumstances like this,” he said.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth set a sentencing date of Sept. 27 for both Thompson and Fairlamb, who has been jailed since his Jan. 22 arrest at his home in Stockholm, N.J.
Fairlamb’s lawyer, Harley Breite, said he will ask the judge for a sentence below the government’s recommended guidelines.
Fairlamb pleaded guilty to two counts, obstruction of an official proceeding and assaulting a Metropolitan Police Department officer. The counts carry a maximum of more than 20 years in prison.