During the assault on the Capitol, Enrique Tarrio “was more of a general than a soldier”, had pointed out the prosecutors. The judge heard them. The former leader of the far-right American group Proud Boys was sentenced on Tuesday, September 5, to twenty-two years in prison, for his direct involvement in the attack of January 6, 2021. This is the heaviest sentencing for this unprecedented desecration of the sanctuary of American democracy.
Last week, the four other Proud Boys members convicted of sedition in May with Enrique Tarrio were sentenced to between 10 and 18 years in prison. Until then, the heaviest sentences for this attack (eighteen years) had been handed down to another former Proud Boys leader, Ethan Nordean, and to Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia.
On January 6, 2021, some 200 members of the Proud Boys stormed the Capitol, the seat of the United States Congress, in an attempt to prevent the certification of the victory of Democrat Joe Biden over incumbent Republican President Donald Trump. This day “broken our tradition of peaceful transfer of power”again lamented the judge, Timothy Kelly.
Unlike the other four defendants, Enrique Tarrio, against whom the prosecution had requested thirty-three years in prison, was not in Washington on this fateful date. But the judge held that “Mr. Tarrio was the ultimate leader of the conspiracy”.
The magistrate seemed insensitive to the remorse expressed at the bar by the accused, his voice at times choked with sobs, who described January 6, 2021 as “awful day” and implored his “leniency”as his sister, his fiancée and his mother had done before with emotion.
“He did not intend to kill”, according to the magistrate
Prosecutor Conor Mulroe had urged the judge to impose a heavier sentence on him than for the other defendants in this case. Mr. Kelly took into account in his calculation the aggravating circumstances for acts of terrorism requested by the prosecutors, but he pronounced for each of the defendants sentences clearly lower than the requisitions, considering that they had not “did not intend to kill”.
Defense lawyers said their client had no control over events due to his absence from Washington on January 6, 2021, but the judge noted that it conveniently allowed him to ” take this distance “ with the assault on the Capitol. Enrique Tarrio was then in Baltimore, in the neighboring state of Maryland, due to a court order requiring him to leave the federal capital.
This injunction was part of the conditions of his release after two days of detention for burning a Black Lives Matter banner (“black lives matter”) belonging to a church in Washington mainly attended by African Americans during a demonstration. which had degenerated in December 2020.
“The physical absence of Tarrio does not in any way lessen the seriousness of his acts since he was more of a general than a soldier”had argued the prosecutors in their written argument in support of their submissions.
Debate on the “race” of the accused
His lawyer, Nayib Hassan, on the contrary demanded clemency for this 39-year-old son of Cuban immigrants, originally from Florida, insisting, despite a former conviction for the sale of stolen medical equipment, on his cooperation with federal investigations into drug trafficking. drugs or human beings.
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He also pointed out that his client is “misidentified as white” in court documents. “The defendant is multiracial and of Afro-Cuban descent, so his race should be recorded as Black. »
The identification with white supremacism of individuals classified as Latinos in the ethno-racial terminology in force in American society raises many questions, explained the anthropologist Yarimar Bonilla in a column published in August by the New York Times, quoting Enrique Tarrio and Mauricio Garcia, author of a massacre in May in a shopping center in Texas, who professed Nazi convictions.
“Just as ‘Western supremacists’ in the United States cling to their European heritage by exalting their Celtic culture, so many Latinos cling to Eurocentric canons of beauty, aesthetics and culture”she observes.
Since January 6, 2021, more than 1,100 people have been arrested and charged. More than half were sentenced, mostly to prison terms.