01-06-2022, 06:15 PM
Jan. 6 Capitol riot criminal prosecutions: Are judges going easy on defendants? (slate.com)
Quote:How Many of the Defendants Remain in Jail?
Very few. Roughly 85 percent of the defendants who were charged in district court have won some kind of pretrial release, and only 15 percent have had to await trial in jail. Contrast this number with the ordinary pretrial release rate and it seems clear that Jan. 6 defendants are receiving special treatment. In 2019, only 42 percent of federal defendants were released from jail while waiting for their court date or for their case to resolve. In that same year, 58 percent of federal defendants were made to await trial in jail.
The Jan. 6 defendants are twice as likely to be released from jail pre-detention as ordinary defendants and more than four times less likely to be held on charges.
How Can This Be?
There are a number of plausible explanations for this phenomenon. Only 30 percent of those arrested on Jan. 6 had a previous criminal history, according to a comprehensive analysis by Robert Pape. Judges take past history into consideration at a number of points in the criminal process, including when deciding who gets to go home and who does not. A recent study by the U.S. Sentencing Commission found that nearly 73 percent of people convicted of federal crimes had at least one prior conviction.
Defendants in Jan. 6 cases are much more likely to be white than those in a typical federal criminal case.
Notably, only about half of the Jan. 6 defendants have been charged with felonies—which, compared with misdemeanor cases, generally are less likely to lead to pretrial release—as opposed to 94 percent of defendants in federal criminal cases in 2019. Finally, and perhaps most critically, Jan. 6 defendants appear to have more resources than the average criminal defendant, reportedly hiring private attorneys at four times the rate of a typical defendant. “There are a few factors related to particularities of these cases that could potentially explain why the Jan. 6 defendants were released pending trial at higher rates than average,” said assistant professor of law at the University of Wisconsin Law School Stephanie Didwania. “But I doubt these factors alone can explain why so many of the Jan. 6 defendants were released.”
It’s hard not to look at the numbers and see another trend: Defendants in Jan. 6 cases are much more likely to be white than those in a typical federal criminal case. In 2018, only 52 percent of the people arrested in the U.S. were white, according to a 2018 study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Black people made up 19 percent of those arrested, and Hispanic people accounted for 17 percent. According to an early estimate by Pape, 95 percent of the Jan. 6 defendants were white.