The dark-haired man—still youthful and trim at 37—lay in a coffin in a Pennsylvania funeral home’s viewing room, the texture of his face, in its mortuary makeup, oddly plastic.
It was early March 2022, and Matthew Perna, a protester who had participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol Hill chaos, had hanged himself in his garage five days earlier.
I had never met Matthew, but I was writing a novel about a family destroyed when a vindictive reporter pursues them because of their participation in J6. My wife Nonna and I wanted to pay our respects to Matthew. We drove seven hours from Illinois to join the viewing line, offer condolences to his distraught family, and attend the funeral.
Matthew’s death came to mind Friday as the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday, in Fischer v. United States, voted 6-3 to void a lower court’s decision allowing a charge of obstructing an official proceeding against defendant Joseph Fischer, a former police officer. The court held that the charge only applied where the defendant destroy records, documents or other relevant items.
The charge had been used to convict 350 J6 protesters, the Washington Post reports. Matthew was among them, according to his aunt, Geri Perna.
Encouragingly, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson joined conservatives Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Chief Justice John Roberts in the decision.
Sadly, it was more than two years too late for Matthew. “It’s a pity he couldn’t have held out to see this day,” Nonna told me when the news broke.
Matthew was crushed under the weight of becoming one of the despised political opponents of the Biden administration—and an outcast in his own community.
‘He touched nothing’
Geri Perna writes that he entered the Capitol peacefully through an open door.
“While inside, he stayed within the velvet ropes in the rotunda, recording and chanting USA, USA!” she writes. “He touched NOTHING, stole NOTHING, broke NOTHING. He was inside the building for 15 minutes or less, and then exited outside the rear of the building.”
When he heard the FBI was looking for him in early 2021, Matthew turned himself in, figuring he had done nothing wrong. (Never talk to law enforcement—especially the FBI—without an attorney present.)
The nation was outraged by the excesses of Jan. 6, and nobody objects to the prosecution of violent rioters. But the Justice Department stretched the law in question to pile charges on hundreds of nonviolent protesters. In arresting Matthew, the DOJ trumpeted that he could earn 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. In 2022, the DOJ signaled that it was planning to add a “sentencing enhancement” of terrorism, Geri Perna writes. That’s what pushed Matthew off the ledge.
The Biden administration and the news media have been absurdly repeating that the four-hour protest and riot was the worst national crisis since the Civil War. Many officials, from the president on down, lied about the death of a Capitol Hill police Officer Brian Sicknick, suggesting that protesters killed him. In fact, he died of natural causes, his autopsy shows.
Lacking any felony to nail many of the protesters with, the DOJ winged it. Judges greenlighted the charges, and juries rubber-stamped convictions.
“It’s been clear from the start that DOJ and prosecutors fabricated an interpretation of an unrelated law to convert non-violent Jan. 6 protesters into felons,” journalist Glenn Greenwald posted on X after Friday’s decision. “Few judges had the courage to rule against Jan 6 prosecutors. [The Supreme Court]—with Jackson joining conservatives—just did.”
“For years,” adds professor and legal analyst Jonathan Turley, “objections to the excessive treatment of these [J6] cases were dismissed as the view of the radical right. Now, even Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to toss out these convictions.”
Federal prosecutors ruthlessly ground the lives of decent people into dust—even after jurisdictions in D.C. and across the country had declined to prosecute left-wing rioters in 2020. Now many victims of the DOJ’s discredited prosecutions still have no way to put together their lives.
‘41 months for tossing water is not Justice’
Julie Kelly, author of the book January 6: How Democrats Used the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right, reported Friday that she was inundated with texts from J6ers after the Supreme Court decision. Some report that judges show no sign of backing off, despite the decision.
One young man texted Kelly, “I was waiting for this day for a long time! It’s unfortunate that my judge said already that she will give me the same time regardless of this outcome : ( the damage is done. 41 months for tossing water is not Justice.
“Do you think trump will still pardon a person like me? I have [an] assault [conviction] but I didn’t touch anyone or hurt anyone : (”
A nurse who took part in the J6 protests told Kelly, “I lost my Georgia nursing license due to this fake felony. Then California sanctioned me for the same felony (although I had not been licensed there since 2015). They then turned me over to federal OIS [Office of Inspector General]. So now background check makes it look like I committed fraud and malpractice, and I’m barred from working anywhere Medicare or Medicaid pays for services. Even Door Dash fired me because of this OIG stigma. None of this is undone.
“I’m unable to work but will need thousands of dollars for attorneys to get all this reversed so that I CAN work.”
Friday’s decision comes too late for many of the victims of perverse prosecutions. It’s certainly too late for Matthew Perna. But perhaps the Court’s slap-down will help prevent further abuses.
[Order Russell Working’s new Jan. 6 novel, The Insurrectionist, here.]
The Elephant Box 