The US Justice Department has sentenced a California man accused of “assaulting a law enforcement officer with a dangerous weapon” during the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to 20 years in prison, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) reported.
The convicted man is David Dempsey, a 37-year-old man from Santa Ana (California), whose sentence includes 240 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release and a payment of $2,000 (about 1,830 euros) “in restitution by federal district judge Royce C. Lamberth,” the DoJ explained in a statement.
Dempsey, who was arrested by the FBI in California on August 26, 2021, “traveled to Washington, DC, with others from his home in California and, on the morning of January 6, 2021, attended the ‘Stop the Steal’ demonstration on the Ellipse.”
Once in the city, the Californian “joined the crowd” and “disrupted the joint session of the US Congress convened to determine and count the electoral votes related to the 2020 presidential election,” the note adds, reflecting how the accused intervened at “the site of some of the most violent attacks against law enforcement on January 6.”
In this regard, the judicial authorities have noted that “for more than an hour, the defendant David Dempsey viciously assaulted and injured police officers defending the Lower West Terrace tunnel with a variety of utensils that he transformed into weapons”; becoming “one of the most violent rioters” at the scene of the Capitol assault, according to prosecutors.
Dempsey is one of more than 1,488 people who, according to the Department of Justice, have been charged with crimes related to the breach of the US Capitol since January 6, 2021, events whose investigation is still ongoing.
This 2024 marks three years since a mob of Donald Trump supporters broke into the headquarters of the United States Capitol to stop the session that confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Since then, hundreds of sentences have been issued, although the culmination – but not the end – of the Department of Justice’s already largest investigation would be an eventual conviction of the former Republican president as the instigator of the events.
