Federal prosecutors pushed in a newly filed sentencing memo for Albuquerque Cosper Head, a Capitol rioter who participated in the assault on then-D.C. police officer Michael Fanone and subsequently pleaded guilty to a charge of assaulting police, to receive eight years in prison.
Head’s sentencing will take place before federal Judge Amy Berman Jackson on October 27, and sentencing recommendations from prosecutors came before those from his defense. (Head is represented by a public defender.) Eight years is the maximum sentence under the assault charge to which he admitted. At the Capitol, Head tried to get at Fanone even after sympathetic members of the riot crowd intervened to help the brutalized officer get to safety. Earlier, Head pulled Fanone by his neck further into the mob, where others, including Kyle Young and Danny Rodriguez, to whom Young provided a stun gun, attacked. Head restrained the officer while he was tased in the large crowd. Fanone was repeatedly tased on the back of his neck, and among other serious injuries, he suffered a heart attack and concussion. “Head only let go when Officer Fanone reacted with enough force to free himself from Head’s grip,” prosecutors noted.
Head has a history of nearly four dozen arrests and multiple domestic violence convictions. Under questioning, he also misrepresented the nature of his actions at the Capitol, claiming to have been essentially boxed in by the crowd pouring into a particular tunnel. “This claim is flatly contradicted by video evidence depicting his willful and persistent participation in some of the most barbaric violence on January 6,” prosecutors said. Inside the Lower West Terrace tunnel at the Capitol, Head also fought police, using a stolen riot shield. Prosecutors note that Head could have heard some of the further assaults against Fanone before later trying to once again attack the officer as other members of the mob moved him away. Head made contact, but one of the others “forcibly pushed Head away.”
Young, a co-defendant in Head’s case whose teenage son was with him in the mob rampage, was already sentenced to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to assault, while Rodriguez, who was charged in another case, appears to have not yet either entered a plea or gone to trial. Rodriguez, who infamously cried under questioning, was charged with assaulting police with a deadly or dangerous weapon — an assault offense that carries up to 20 years in prison. “They take a Danny Rodriguez interview, and they see that oh, this guy’s a moron,” Fanone said in a December 2021 interview with HuffPost. “He’s a sad person who’s kind of pathetic in a way, and they think, ‘How bad could January 6 really have been?’.. They’re not looking at the big picture. This was an orchestrated event. Despite the fact that most of the people on the ground are buffoons, so what? There are 15,000 of them.” Rodriguez was detained ahead of further court proceedings and trial.
