Coverage and commentary as 100th guilty plea entered for federal charges in January 6 riots

Zoe Tillman at BuzzFeed News has an impressive extended report with all sorts of linked documents to chronicle pleas entered so far on federal charges stemming from the January 6 riot at the US Capitol.  This main article is fully  headlined: "100 Capitol Rioters Have Pleaded Guilty. Here’s What Their Cases Show About The Jan. 6 Investigation.  Guilty pleas are stacking up. Here’s what rioters are admitting to, and what they and the government are getting out of these deals."  Here is a snippet:

One hundred is an arguably arbitrary number, since the total number of people charged with participating in the riots keeps growing and prosecutors haven’t announced a target for when the investigation will end. The FBI has hundreds of photos posted online of people they’re still trying to identify.

But 100 is a nice round number, and a large enough pool to understand the deals that prosecutors have offered in the months since the attack on the Capitol, who is taking them, and what both sides are getting in return.  BuzzFeed News is publishing a database of documents filed in connection with these pleas, including the agreements that outline the terms and separate statements of the criminal conduct that defendants are admitting to....

Defendants taking early deals are avoiding the greater legal risk and public exposure they’d face if they went to trial; they’re hoping to walk away with little to no time behind bars.  Prosecutors are securing a steady stream of convictions as they continue to track down more suspects and defend against legal challenges to some of the more complex cases they’ve already brought.

Judges, meanwhile, are using some of their final encounters with rioters at plea hearings and sentencings to denounce the post-election conspiracy theories that motivated the riots and the right-wing rhetoric downplaying the severity of what happened at the Capitol in the months that followed.  They’ve insisted defendants fully admit the role they played — not just the individual criminal activity they’re pleading guilty to, but also enabling the attack on Congress and bolstering Trump’s effort to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power after he lost in November.

This companion article, headlined "How To Read The Capitol Riot Plea Deals: A judge accepted the 100th guilty plea in the Jan. 6 cases on Wednesday," provides a nice primer on how to understand the particulars of all the federal filings in these cases.

And, somewhat relatedly, Carissa Byrne Hessick has this effective new Lawfare piece titled "Are the Jan. 6 Plea Deals Too Lenient?".  Here is its concluding paragraph:

In short, it may be too soon to judge how federal prosecutors are using their plea bargaining leverage in the Jan. 6 cases.  Only a small fraction of those cases have resulted in guilty pleas at this point.  And it appears that so far the government has been prioritizing those defendants who did little more than enter the Capitol, walk around and leave. More generally, defendants who plead guilty sooner tend to get shorter sentences than those who plead guilty later. In fact, some prosecutors make “exploding” plea offers that expire if a defendant takes too long to plead guilty.  All of these factors suggest that the bulk of the Jan. 6 defendants may end up receiving far less lenient plea bargains than we’ve seen so far.  Although it seems like a safe prediction that other Jan. 6 defendants will get lenient plea deals, whether that is what actually happens is in the hands of the government.  When it comes to plea bargaining, prosecutors hold all the cards, and so while a handful of Jan. 6 defendants may choose to go to trial, prosecutors will get to dictate what the guilty pleas look like for the rest of them.

Some of many prior related posts:

• "Many Capitol rioters unlikely to serve jail time" because some facing only misdemeanor convictions
• Noting the importance of charging policies and practices (and consistency?) as federal rioting charges get resolved from coast-to-coast
• Harsh penal treatment of some Capitol rioters being criticized by notable progressive 
• New plea deals sets possible new precedent for resolving low-level Capitol riot prosecutions with single misdemeanor with 6 month jail maximum
• Federal judges expressing some concern about lenient plea deals for some Capitol riot defendants
• Notable accounting of federal prosecutions and sentences responding to riots both before and during January 6
• Recent Jan 6 rioter sentencings showcase different judges with different sentencing perspectives