January 6 defendant Kevin Seefried of Laurel, Delaware, has been granted early release from prison after the Supreme Court agreed to take up a relevant appeal.
Seefried was handed a three-year prison term for “obstruction of an official proceeding,” with additional periods of one year and six months on misdemeanor charges.
The obstruction charge is at the center of the Supreme-Court-approved case Fischer v. United States, which questions the novel way Joe Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) has used it to prosecute many Jan 6 protestors.
While the DOJ argues the disruption of the 2020 election’s certification caused by protestors amounted to obstruction of an official proceeding, the relevant laws were passed in the wake of the Enron scandal. They were not intended to target protestors, but people who doctored and destroyed documents to sabotage an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
Should Fischer succeed in the Supreme Court, a large number of protestors tried on obstruction of an official proceeding charges could be freed. Moreover, “conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding” and “obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding” are among the charges special prosecutor Jack Smith has leveled at Donald Trump, and Fischer‘s success could cut the case against the former president “in half.”
Years on from 2021, Jan 6 prosecutions are accelerating rather than decelerating. Prosecutors are targeting protestors for increasingly minor offenses, including MAGA influencer Isabella DeLuca, whose alleged crime is touching a table that was later passed out of a broken window.
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