A website called Becker News posted an article on Monday about what is happening to  the January 6th defendants.

The article reports:

The Department of Justice has provided one of the first documented concessions that prosecutors are withholding potentially exculpatory evidence in court cases concerning January 6 defendants.

Acting United States Attorney Channing D. Phillips suggested on Monday that this is the motivation behind keeping more than 14,000 hours of documentary footage of the January 6 events out of the hands of defense attorneys and the public in United States v. Couy Griffin.

Griffin, a county commissioner for Otero County, New Mexico, was arrested for Entering and Remaining in a Restricted Building and Disorderly and Disruptive Conduct in a Restricted Building, on January 19. The prosecution sought to waive the defendants’ right to a speedy trial.

The defendant was released on his own personal recognizance on February 5, 2021. On March 18, 2021, the United States filed a motion for a 60-day continuance of the proceeding, according to the court filing.

Why would the prosecution want to waive the defendants’ right to a speedy trial?

The article explains:

The government’s reasoning on the continuance motion was that the Capitol Breach investigation was so complex and sweeping that it would “make the immediate legal proceeding impossible, or result in a miscarriage of justice,” the prosecutors argued. The defense called the prosecution’s bluff. The U.S. attorneys did not want to give the defendant a speedy trial because they have other concerns.

“The same day, Defendant filed an opposition to the government’s motion, objecting to tolling of his constitutional and statutory rights to a speedy trial. Defendant asserted that there was nothing complex about his case, which ‘actually involves pictures of [him] with a bullhorn on the Capitol steps,’ argued that the government had mischaracterized its own ‘logistical and manpower burdens’ as a complexity created by the case itself, and essentially accused the government of weaponizing the STA ‘to strategically manage which trials and cases it wishes to put forward to the public first’,” the court filing states.

The obvious issue is a complication arising over the matter of potentially exculpatory evidence within the more than 14,000 hours of archival footage and other documentary evidence related to the January 6th events at the capitol.

The article concludes:

“What is obvious now in hindsight is that the Biden Justice Department prosecutors sought and obtained felony charges in many cases based on almost no meaningful review of actual evidence about what happened; it used fear and hysteria to justify doing so,” Shipwreckedcrew of Human Events observes. “Now they are being pressed to provide the evidence that is supposed to support the felony charges they brought, and are unable to do so in the timeframe required by law. So they are abandoning the cases on the best possible outcome available—the least serious of all federal crimes, ‘petty’ misdemeanors.”

“Now that the DOJ has gone down the path of exchanging guilty pleas to misdemeanors for some defendants charged with felonies, it will become more difficult to not do the same for a much larger number of defendants where the facts are substantially the same,” the Human Events piece added.

The Department of Justice appears to have politicized the charges against the Jan. 6 defendants for effect. This is not consistent with “justice,” this is the weaponization of the nation’s highest law enforcement agency to do the bidding of the dominant political party.

The treatment of those who entered the Capitol Building on January 6th is a blight on our justice system. The protesters should not have entered the Capitol or engaged in behavior other than peaceful protest, but the way they have been treated is much more typical of a third-world country than a representative republic.

The Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution states:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

It’s time we started following our Constitution.