A former Boston police K-9 officer and a New Jersey electrician described as one of “the most violent” Jan. 6 rioters were sentenced Friday in Washington, D.C., for crimes committed during the 2021 storming of the Capitol.
Joseph Robert Fisher of Plymouth, Massachusetts., who pleaded guilty this year to two felony charges of civil disorder and assaulting an officer, told the federal judge in his case that he was embarrassed by his actions, NBC News reported.
Fisher said he wanted to offer a heartfelt apology to the U.S. Capitol Police, calling his conduct “egregious,” NBC said.
The now-retired police officer, 52, attended the “Stop the Steal” rally at the National Mall and made his way into the Capitol building, according to court documents.
Once inside, he helped assist one of the rioters in the pro-Trump mob who was fighting with Capitol Police officers, the documents said.
Fisher “grabbed a chair, hid behind a pillar, and waited as the rioter and (one) officer approached his position,” prosecutors said. When they ran by him, “Fisher rammed the chair into the officer, preventing the officer from apprehending the rioter.”
He was arrested in March 2023. U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss sentenced him to 20 months in prison and 24 months of supervised release.
Facial recognition that has been used to identify many of the Capitol rioters found an image of Fisher on a video of a news conference after the capture of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, one of the brothers who bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, NBC reported.
In the same courthouse Friday, U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden, in a bench trial, found a New Jersey man guilty of 14 charges, including 12 felonies for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.
The judge sentenced 37-year-old Christopher Joseph Quaglin of New Brunswick to 12 years in prison.
Quaglin, whom a prosecutor called “among the most violent of the January 6 rioters,” had agreed to the bench, or non-jury, trial.
“You are a menace to our society,” the judge told him during sentencing, local television station WUSA9 reported.
Quaglin was defiant during his hearing. As he left the courtroom, he told the Trump-nominated judge that he was the former president’s “worst mistake of 2016.”
As of Friday, at least 1,424 people have been charged in nearly all 50 states for crimes related to the breach of the U.S. Capitol, according to the Department of Justice.
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