ROANOKE, Va. – President Donald Trump’s sweeping order of pardons and commutations for 1,500 defendants connected to the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol includes a dozen people from the region.
Several cases or sentences following convictions were still pending. Nathan Bordeaux of Floyd was arrested just last week on several charges, including assaulting law enforcement. That case will now be dropped along with several others.
Two other defendants, Peter Willey of Roanoke and Ethan Mauck of Troutville, were set to be sentenced next month.
Thomas Robertson, a former Rocky Mount police officer, recently received a reduced sentence of six years in prison after being convicted of six counts, including charges that he interfered with police officers during a civil disorder.
The president and other critics of the Justice Department under the Biden administration said the prosecutions were overzealous and the sentences too harsh.
But John Fishwick, former U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia, said the justice system should have had the final say in these cases.
“Typically, in our country, we leave those decisions to judges and juries. You know, you can file appeals. You can take those cases all the way to the Supreme Court,” Fishwick said. “Whenever we have a president kind of putting his thumb on the scale of justice in such a broad-reaching way on basically 1,500 cases and totally wiping the slate clean, I think then the folks lose confidence in the justice system.”
Fishwick also criticized former President Joe Biden’s pardons of those on the Jan. 6 Committee, warning that action could also signify a lack of faith in the justice system.
Dr. Cayce Myers with Virginia Tech said the debate over Jan. 6 is a sign of how political speech has changed in the past decade.
“The facts of Jan. 6 remain the same, but the historical interpretation of it has changed depending on your philosophical viewpoint,” Myers said. “[The] storming of the Capitol remains such an outsized political issue, a legacy issue for Trump and I think it’s not going to be going away anytime soon in terms of politics.”
Fishwick said the effects of the pardon were to wipe away years of work by the Biden DOJ.
“There’s no place in this country for political violence, no matter which side of the political spectrum you’re on. I expect that the new DOJ under Trump would certainly prosecute folks who have committed political violence,” he said. “But nonetheless, a message from yesterday, unfortunately, some folks will interpret it as that you can be protesting and commit violence and it’s ultimately going to be forgiven, and that should not be the case.”
Fishwick expects that the defendants will be released from jail or prison as soon as possible and mentioned that the cases cannot be retried.