I have not done a deep dive into the treatment of the January 6th prisoners, not because I don’t have opinions, but because I don’t have educated opinions regarding what is happening in Washington to these people.

I have the general sense that a vast injustice is being done to many of them, but without doing the work that others like Julie Kelly have been doing I have kept my unformed thoughts to myself.

Don’t get me wrong. I think the rioters who invaded the Capitol on January 6th were wrong to do so. I just don’t think they were trying to commit an insurrection (the idea is silly) and am shocked at the disproportionate treatment they have gotten. Prosecutors who wave away as mere peccadillos the arson and looting America has been subjected to over the past few years are putting protesters in solitary confinement for years because they have the wrong politics.

Everything seems turned upside down when a man who was never near the Capitol on January 6th can be imprisoned for over 2 decades for what happened there.

The system is broken beyond repair pic.twitter.com/NDpo5KcGl0

— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) September 5, 2023

Literal child rapists get off with slaps on their wrists while opponents of the current regime get tossed into cells with the keys thrown away. It is banana republic stuff.

Biden DOJ asking for reduced sentence for BLM rioter who set fire that killed a man: Defendant felt 'frustrated…disenfranchised.' He was 'caught up in the fury of the mob.' And he believed that by rioting he was engaging in 'the language of the unheard.' https://t.co/BGCZdoaY7w

— Byron York (@ByronYork) September 6, 2023

The invaluable Byron York alerted me to a story that highlights just how insane our legal system has become, and just how politically twisted the current Justice Department is. At issue is the case of Montez Lee, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison for setting a fire that killed a man during the Black Lives Matter riot in Minneapolis.

According to the sentencing guidelines, Lee should have been sentenced to 20 years for his crimes of arson and homicide. He reveled in his crime and exhorted others to join him in burning down the city of Minneapolis. He was filmed spreading an accelerant in a store, lighting the fire, and exalting in front of the store as it burned.

It happened in a pawn shop on May 28, 2020. Lee and others broke into the shop, and video showed looters ransacking the store. Lee then poured a liquid, an accelerant, from a can all across the floor. Lee then lit the fire. More video showed him boasting shortly afterward about what he had done. “F*** this place,” Lee said. “We’re gonna burn this bitch down.” Video then showed, according to government documents, Lee and others “joking about restaurants they are going to ‘hit’ next.”

The store lay in ruins. Then, a few days later, a woman reported that her son was missing. Police discovered that his car had been found near the pawn shop. They searched the rubble and found the body of Oscar Stewart, a 30-year-old man who had five children. An autopsy showed that Stewart died of burns and smoke inhalation. The death was ruled a homicide.

Lee was in a lot of trouble. In addition to setting the fire that killed Stewart, Lee had prior convictions for burglary, assault, violation of a no-contact order, and theft. Under the circumstances, Justice Department prosecutors gave him a good deal: Lee pleaded guilty to one count of arson. According to sentencing guidelines, he faced 20 years in prison.

There was a video, by the way, because all these savage looters were proud of what they were doing. They weren’t merely committing a crime for gain, but destroying things for the sake of destruction. Lee had even traveled to Minneapolis from Rochester, MN to get in on the rioting action.

So why is Lee’s rather light sentence for arson and homicide noteworthy?

For a couple of reasons, actually. First, it was not some local judge or local prosecutor who was so lenient on him; it was the US Attorney and a federal judge who cut him so much slack.

Secondly and even more importantly, the Justice Department went to bat for Lee and actually justified his crimes to the judge and asked for leniency on his behalf. A leniency that they acknowledge is “extraordinary.”

York quotes the key passage from the sentencing memo:

Mr. Lee credibly states that he was in the streets to protest unlawful police violence against black men, and there is no basis to disbelieve this statement. Mr. Lee, appropriately, acknowledges that he “could have demonstrated in a different way,” but that he was “caught up in the fury of the mob after living as a black man watching his peers suffer at the hands of police.” As anyone watching the news world-wide knows, many other people in Minnesota were similarly caught up. There appear to have been many people in those days looking only to exploit the chaos and disorder in the interest of personal gain or random violence. There appear also to have been many people who felt angry, frustrated, and disenfranchised, and who were attempting, in many cases in an unacceptably reckless and dangerous manner, to give voice to those feelings. Mr. Lee appears to be squarely in this latter category. And even the great American advocate for non-violence and social justice, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., stated in an interview with CBS’s Mike Wallace in 1966 that “we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.”

The argument being made by the US Attorney is that Mr. Lee should get a reduced sentence because his violence was political violence and the politics he was promoting were the right ones.

Enrique Tarrio’s (non-violence) was a political offense, and hence he should serve 22 years for objecting to the results of the 2020 elections and promoting the idea that people should protest the results. There was no coup attempt, and he didn’t plan a coup attempt. The riot at the Capitol was far less serious or damaging than anything seen here in Minneapolis or across the country in 2020, and his actions were incomparably less damaging than the homicide that Lee committed.

We can argue about what punishment is appropriate for Tarrio, if any, and what crimes he is or is not guilty of. Not being familiar enough with the details I will give no opinion on that.

But on its face, it is clear that the Justice Department has two standards: arson and murder are less serious if done in the name of Left-wing causes than being the nominal leader of a politically disfavored group. The Justice Department will go to the ends of the Earth to find nonviolent people who walked through the Capitol on January 6th doing little more than look, but go to bat for a man who killed another because he was speaking the “language of the unheard.”

Tarrio and his compatriots, as well as millions of other Americans, feel unheard. January 6th was no less a scream of rage than the riots of 2020, although they did far less damage than the George Floyd riots. In fact, the only person to be murdered that day was killed by a Capitol Policeman who shot the victim in the back and got rewarded for it.

The Left has been loudly proclaiming their love of and desire to “Defend Democracy;” what I see is a disgusting weaponization of the law in favor of friends and against their enemies.