A lawyer for one of the two brothers detained on felony charges in connection to the Jan 6. Riot, compared his client to the Black Lives Matter protestors of 2020, per Law & Crime. The judge wasn’t so enthused. The lawyer argued his client was subjected to a “politically motivated prosecution.” Well, that’s what happens when you partake in a politically motivated insurrection.
Adam Jackson and his brother Brian Scott Jackson were spotted at the Capitol insurrection. The report says Adam was allegedly wielding a traffic cone at an officer and holding a stolen police riot shield in attempt to bum-rush the entryway of the building. In Adam’s latest motion hearing, his lawyer, Joseph McBride, argued that Jackson was a “law-abiding citizen” whose First Amendment rights were at stake.
He also argued there was a “commonality” between Jackson’s actions at the insurrection and the BLM demonstrators who protested following the murder of George Floyd.
“I’m referring to the fact that lots of people, when it came to the Black Lives Matter protests, participated in acts of violence, but they were largely given a pass. Why were they given a pass?” said McBride.
More on the hearing from Law & Crime:
McBride said that demonstrators protesting Floyd’s murder while in police custody “poured out into the streets” in order to “redress their government for political grievances.”
So, too, was his client on Jan. 6.
“He went [to the Capitol] to protest what he saw as improper political results,” McBride said, adding that it didn’t matter if the results actually were improper, or whether the claims of widespread voter fraud were even true (they weren’t).
What matters, McBride said, was that Adam Jackson’s “intentions and thought process were politically grounded and therefore protected by the First Amendment.”
I can’t put it any better than author Kimberly Jones. “As long as we’re focusing on what they’re doing, we’re not focusing on why they’re doing it,” Jones said back in 2020. Every time someone comes around to make a comparison between the damage from the BLM protests and the Capitol riot, they always forgot to mention the motives.
Now, the white supremacist terrorists who stormed a government building are pleading the First Amendment to justify their nationalist outrage. Think about what their ‘why’ was.
US District Judge Rudolph Contreras wasn’t so impressed with McBride’s comparison. “The one violent Black Lives Matter protester that came to me went to prison, so some arguments are going to resonate more than others,” he said, per Law & Crime.
Jackson currently faces multiple charges including assaulting, resisting, or impeding officers using a dangerous weapon and physical violence or disorderly conduct in a restricted building.