Michael Sparks, the first of the mob that stormed the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, has been sentenced to more than four years in prison by a federal court, in a trial in which he said that “to this day” he continues to believe in former President Donald Trump’s theories of electoral fraud.
“I am an American citizen who believes to this day that we are in a tyranny,” Sparks, who holds the dubious honor of being the first to manage to enter the Capitol headquarters and chase one of the overwhelmed security agents guarding the interior of the building, told the judge on Tuesday.
Sparks has assured that those elections were “snatched” from the people. In response, Judge Timothy J. Kelly has pointed out that he is free to believe any theory, no matter how unfounded it may be, but that does not mean acting as he did.
“I think you don’t appreciate the full gravity of what happened that day and the seriousness of your actions,” the judge told him. “What happened on January 6 simply cannot happen again (…) What a dangerous precedent it set,” he concluded, according to the American channel NBC.
Although the charge of obstructing an official procedure, in relation to the counting of electoral votes, was dropped after a decision by the Supreme Court that affected hundreds of other defendants, the judge maintained that the attitude shown by him during the trial showed that those were his intentions.
More than 1,400 people have been charged with the attacks on January 6, of whom more than 1,000 have been convicted, although many of them have received probationary sentences. More than 500 have received sentences ranging from a few days behind bars to 22 years in prison, as was the case of the head of the far-right militia Proud Boys, Enrique Tarrio, handed down by Kelly himself.
