(ST. PAUL, Minn) – Senator Ron Latz (DFL-St. Louis Park) has authored Senate Resolution 15, a resolution expressing the Minnesota Senate’s condemnation of President Trump’s pardon of criminal participants of the January 6 insurrection who had been found guilty of violent crimes.
The resolution will be heard in the Senate Judiciary and Public Safety Committee on Wednesday, March 12 at 12:30 p.m.
“In one of his first official acts after returning to power, President Trump issued pardons to the approximately 1,500 people convicted of crimes related to the January 6 attack on our Capitol,” said Sen. Latz. “This indiscriminate pardon has wiped away the criminal record of people who assaulted police officers with mace, baseball bats, and other weapons and set free members of far-right extremist groups like the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys. This pardon was a blatant abuse of presidential power, a betrayal of our law enforcement community, and an insult to our Constitution, and I hope that every one of my colleagues in the Senate joins me in condemning this conduct.”
On January 21, shortly after being sworn in, President Trump granted “a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021.”
A partial list of those pardoned or who had their sentence commuted includes:
- Enrique Tarrio, the former Proud Boys chairman, who had been sentenced to 22 years in the federal prison.
- Stewart Rhodes, founder of the far-right Oath Keepers group, who had been sentenced to 18 years in prison.
- Matthew Huttle, who was killed in a police shooting in late January after an altercation took place between him and an officer following a traffic stop.
- David Dempsey, who received a 20-year sentence for assault on law enforcement where he repeatedly attacked police for more than an hour, throwing poles and deploying bear spray at the line of officers protecting the Capitol. He used bear spray directly inside the mask of one officer, who testified that he thought he might die. He used a crutch to smash another officer’s head, cracking his plastic face shield and giving him a concussion.
- Roughly 200 people who had pleaded guilty to assaulting law enforcement.
The January 6 insurrection injured more than 140 police officers in one of the largest mass attacks on law enforcement officers in American history and impeded the certification of the 2020 presidential election for several hours.
The resolution is co-authored by Senators Oumou Verbeten, Clark, Seeberger and Murphy.
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