The Elephant Box

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.