Judge reduces prison sentence for Army veteran convicted in Capitol riots

A U.S. district judge on Wednesday reduced the sentence of an Army veteran and former police officer who was found guilty on six counts for his participation in the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Virginia resident Thomas Robertson was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2022. He is accused of obstructing the work of police officers during a riot and entering a restricted area with a dangerous weapon. Robertson carried a large wooden stick during the riot and was photographed in the Capitol crypt making an obscene gesture in front of a statue of John Stark, an American general during the Revolutionary War, prosecutors said during the jury trial.

U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper reduced Robertson’s sentence to six years in prison on Wednesday, The Associated Press reported. The new ruling follows Cooper’s overturning of one of Robertson’s convictions: obstructing Congress’s certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in June that a charge of obstruction of an official proceeding must include proof that a defendant attempted to tamper with or destroy documents – a distinction that did not apply in the Robertson case and in most of the hundreds of criminal cases on Jan. 6.

The Army veteran is the first defendant in the Capitol riot case to have his sentence reconsidered following the Supreme Court ruling. In court documents, prosecutors had asked the judge to keep the original sentence.

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Robertson, who declined to address the court at his first sentencing hearing, told the judge on Wednesday that he was looking forward to returning home and rebuilding his life after prison, AP reported.

“I realize that the positions I took that day were wrong,” he said of Jan. 6. “I stand here before you and I deeply regret what happened that day.”

Robertson served in the U.S. Army for four years from 1991 to 1994 and then joined the Army Reserve in 2001, his lawyers wrote in court documents. He was deployed to Iraq in 2008 and was injured by gunshot and shrapnel in Afghanistan in 2011, the documents say. He underwent 10 surgeries for his injuries.

After recovering, Robertson joined the Rocky Mount, Virginia, police force and became a sergeant. He was off-duty but still working for the police force when he joined the Capitol riots. The city fired him after his arrest.

In a Facebook post on November 7, 2020, Robertson said: “I have spent most of my adult life fighting an insurgency. (I am) about to become part of one, and a very effective one at that.”

Before his first sentencing in 2022, Robertson wrote a letter to the judge saying he takes full responsibility for his actions on January 6 and “all the bad decisions I made.”

He attributed the vitriolic content of his social media posts to a mixture of stress, alcohol abuse and “delving into deep ‘rabbit holes’ of election conspiracy theories.”

“I sat around at night, drinking too much, reacting to articles and websites given to me by Facebook’s algorithms,” he wrote.

This story was created in collaboration with Military veterans in journalism. Please send tips to [email protected].