Observers have recently commented that the January 6 criminal cases are being treated differently from other cases, often, referring to criminal cases arising from Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests and/or Antifa riots. The difficulty in making that comparison is that those cases are often not similar to the January 6 cases in ways that the law considers relevant to the question of equal treatment. For example, the BLM and Antifa cases are often being pursued in state courts by state prosecutors, which operate very differently from federal prosecutors and federal courts. Or the types of charges or the specific conduct of the defendants is different from the January 6 defendants. Those differences make the claim of disparate treatment relatively easy to brush off.

However, the claim of unequal treatment is, in fact, legitimate. A comparison of the January 6 cases to other federal cases involving the same kind of conduct demonstrates that the January 6 cases are being treated significantly more harshly by DOJ and the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office.

This article is the first of three in a series demonstrating that that the government has been and is, in fact, treating the January 6 cases more harshly in terms of the charges brought, requests for detention of the defendants pending trial, disposition of the charges, and sentencing demands.