When Donald Trump and others on the Right seek to lavish support on participants in the chaos in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021, on the other side are actual individuals like a newly sentenced Kentucky man who admitted to a charge of assaulting, resisting, or impeding police. He got 30 months in prison.
Defendant Clayton Ray Mullins, after attending Trump’s large, outdoor rally in the city that day, trekked to the Capitol building, where he engaged in serious confrontations with police outside the actual building itself. Mullins joined violence that was perpetrated around the Capitol’s Lower West Terrace tunnel, a site often mentioned in these assault cases from the riot. In one encounter, Mullins violently yanked an officer’s leg as they struggled on the ground. “Ultimately, the officer was dragged down the Capitol steps, where they were further attacked by other rioters,” a press release says.
Mullins subsequently shoved another officer down a series of steps. These encounters unfolded more than two hours after the Capitol building itself was breached elsewhere, though Mullins was reportedly also on the Capitol grounds earlier. “At about 2:00 p.m., Mullins was amongst the crowd of rioters gathered on the West Plaza, facing off against an established police line behind a barricaded fence,” that release explains.
Besides his time in jail, Mullins was also hit with a series of steep financial penalties, including $2,000 in restitution to the Architect of the Capitol, $30,165 in restitution to an officer with the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department for medical expenses, and $49,764 in fines. The officer whose leg Mullins grabbed as they struggled was with that same department and sustained injuries.
Elsewhere in Capitol riot cases, the government recently secured a judge’s order for Edward Richmond Jr. to be detained ahead of trial after authorities found a reportedly loaded AR-15 firearm in his residence at the time of arrest. Richmond was accused of assaulting police at the Capitol. He also has a decades-old conviction on a manslaughter allegation for shooting and killing a civilian overseas while in the military.
