An admitted participant in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, who was fighting police officers outside the building hours after the initial breach of the building and overall complex should receive eight years in prison, prosecutors said in a new filing. Their specific request was 97 months.
The defendant is Jack Wade Whitton, a Georgia man who perhaps most notably though certainly not exclusively dragged a police officer further into the mob, where that law enforcement figure was violently assaulted. Prosecutors summarize those actions thusly in their new sentencing memo: “Whitton brutally assaulted one of the officers by repeatedly striking him with a metal crutch, and then, in his own words, “fed him to the people” by dragging the officer head-first and face-down into the violent, angry mob of rioters, where he was beaten.”
He also at least tried to physically attack a second officer around that same point, kicking “at” them while this police officer was on the ground per an earlier press release. And separately, he made his overall intentions clear, later telling targeted police that they were going to “die tonight.” In the recent memo on Whitton’s forthcoming sentencing, prosecutors credited him with helping essentially kick off a wave of the violence, characterizing his actions against beleaguered officers as resultantly “igniting an eruption of mayhem and violence that other rioters quickly joined.”
The general tone of the actions alleged of Whitton is hardly unique among January 6 participants, but this set of facts hasn’t stopped Donald Trump and others from expressing support for such individuals anyway. Trump keeps talking up the possibility of issuing pardons if he regains the White House, which federal prosecutors in his own January 6 case have previewed they intend to use as context allegedly delineating his overarching criminal conspiracies. Here, Whitton’s forthcoming sentencing was set up by a guilty plea late last year, when he admitted to a felony count of assaulting police with a dangerous weapon. The latter portion of the charge raised the max amount of jail he could’ve faced to 20 years.
