Lawyers: Prosecutors are starting to seek plea deals in Capitol riot cases

The prosecutors overseeing the vast investigation into the riot at the Capitol this winter have started offering plea deals to defendants, several lawyers said, a significant step in advancing the inquiry into the attack.

The plea negotiations, which have largely been informal, are in an early stage, and as of late last week, only one defendant among hundreds charged had pleaded guilty. But many lawyers have recently acknowledged having private conversations with the government and have sought to determine how much prison time their clients might be willing to accept.

“What’s going on,” said Gregory T. Hunter, who has represented several Capitol Hill defendants, “is a process of coming up with numbers that everybody hopes will fairly describe what people did.”

The extension of plea deals, even on a large scale, is typical in a legal system in which the vast majority of criminal cases never reach a jury. The likelihood that many, if not most, of the more than 400 defendants charged in connection with Jan. 6 will eventually plead guilty will have an added benefit in Washington: It will relieve the city’s federal court of the burden of conducting scores of trials at once.

The hashing out of plea deals will also force the government to grapple yet again with what has from the start been the central tension in the mass prosecution: the struggle to mete out justice on an individual level for the often intersecting actions of a mob.

This week, prosecutors said in court that they would soon be offering plea deals to four men charged together with assaulting the police in a melee near the Senate wing entrance of the Capitol. But to draft the deals precisely, prosecutors will have to determine not only which of the men did what to which of the officers but also how badly the officers were injured.

By and large, the penalty ranges for federal crimes are set by law, although prosecutors have the discretion to ask judges to add more time to certain sentences for a variety of what are called enhancements. Defense lawyers say they expect the Justice Department will ultimately devise a standardized method for calculating plea deals in the numerous Capitol cases and establish “packages” that lay out preset offers for crimes like misdemeanor trespassing or felony assault.