Proud Boy who smashed window at US Capitol sentenced to 10 years

WASHINGTON - Dominic Pezzola, the rank-and-file member of the Proud Boys who led

the charge into the Capitol on Jan 6, 2021,

by shattering a window with a stolen police riot shield, was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in prison.

The sentence imposed on Pezzola was the third to have been handed down this week to five members of the far-right group who were tried in May for seditious conspiracy and other crimes in one of the most significant prosecutions to have emerged from the Capitol attack.

It was only half of the 20 years that the government had requested.

Pezzola, a flooring contractor from Rochester, New York, was the only one of the five men charged in the case who was found not guilty of sedition at the trial in US District Court in Washington.

But the jury convicted him of six other felonies, including assaulting a police officer, a conspiracy to keep members of Congress from certifying the election, and the destruction of one of the Capitol building’s windows.

Video clips of that attack showing Pezzola, with a scraggly beard and wild mane of hair, hammering at the glass with a plastic riot shield, were among the most enduring images to have emerged from the Justice Department’s sprawling investigation.

Pezzola’s sentencing in the federal courthouse – within sight of the Capitol building – came one day after Judge Timothy J. Kelly, a Trump appointee who oversaw the Proud Boys’ sedition case,

imposed a 17-year term on Joseph Biggs,

a former top lieutenant in the far-right group, and handed Zachary Rehl, who once ran the Proud Boys Philadelphia chapter, 15 years in prison.

The government has long maintained that Pezzola was the most aggressive of the five men who went to trial in the conspiracy case, a point that prosecutors drove home on Friday.

“He was an enthusiastic foot soldier in that conspiracy,” Mr Erik Kenerson, one of the prosecutors, told Judge Kelly.

Mr Steven Metcalf, Pezzola’s lawyer, agreed in part, admitting that his client became notorious weeks before Jan 6, when The Washington Post placed a photograph of him on its front page after an earlier pro-Trump rally in Washington.

But Pezzola was not like the other Proud Boys with whom he had been charged, having joined the group weeks before the Capitol attack. NYTIMES