“It’s my intention that Mr. DePape will never get out of prison, he can never be paroled,” Dorfman said while handing out the punishment. He later said, “I don’t feel sympathy for you. I feel sympathy for the victim in this case, who’s lucky to be alive.”
Adam Lipson, a San Francisco deputy public defender, had requested Dorfman to contemplate DePape’s psychological well being and isolation that made him prone to on-line propaganda.
“This is a man who has always been a peaceful, law-abiding person up until his activation,” Lipson mentioned earlier than the punishment was handed down.
When given the prospect to handle the courtroom previous to his sentencing, DePape, wearing jail orange and together with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at size about Sept. 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being changed by a physique double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring in opposition to him.
“I’m a psychic,” DePape instructed the courtroom, studying from sheets of paper. “The more I meditate, the more psychic I get.”
The decide interrupted DePape a number of occasions to ask if he wished to handle the jury’s verdict or his conduct on the night time of the assault, however DePape ignored the presents.
In a letter learn in courtroom by the sufferer’s daughter, Christine Pelosi, Paul Pelosi known as for the utmost sentence, saying the “last peaceful sleep” he had ended abruptly “when the defendant violently broke into my home, burst into my bedroom and stood over my bed with a hammer and zip ties demanding to see my wife, yelling ‘Where’s Nancy?’”
He mentioned the assault left him with bumps on his head, a steel plate in it, dizziness and nerve harm in his left hand. Sleeping alone at residence evokes reminiscences of the assault, he mentioned.
Beforehand, a federal jury convicted DePape of assaulting a federal official’s member of the family and trying to kidnap a federal official. In Might, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal jail.
Though DePape expressed regret for his actions on the federal sentencing, he didn’t try this on Tuesday. Judges in each instances mentioned they may not ignore the seriousness of concentrating on elected officers.
Decide Dorfman on Tuesday additionally sentenced DePape to extra years on the opposite counts, however all of the sentences, together with the federal one, will run concurrently. He mentioned that if an appellate courtroom overturns his sentence of life with out parole, he’ll ask that the case be despatched again to his courtroom for resentencing.
Lipson instructed reporters after the listening to that he’ll attraction the ruling. “This was a really tragic end to a tragic story,” he mentioned.
The prosecutors, San Francisco assistant district attorneys Sean Connolly and Phoebe Maffei, mentioned in an announcement that the sentence displays the seriousness of DePape’s conduct and the hurt he inflicted on an harmless man.
“There isn’t a rejoicing in such instances. There aren’t any winners,” it mentioned.
The protection argued that the state trial amounted to double jeopardy, saying that though the state and federal counts weren’t precisely the identical, the 2 instances stem from the identical act. The decide dismissed a few of the state fees, however he stored others that weren’t coated by the federal case.
The Oct. 28, 2022, assault on Paul Pelosi was captured on police physique digital camera video simply days earlier than the midterm elections and shocked the political world. He suffered head wounds, together with a cranium fracture that was mended with plates and screws.
DePape, a Canadian citizen who has been residing within the U.S. for years, admitted throughout his federal trial that he deliberate to carry Nancy Pelosi hostage, file his interrogation of her, and “break her kneecaps” if she didn’t admit to the lies he mentioned she instructed about “Russiagate,” a reference to the investigation into Russian interference within the 2016 presidential marketing campaign.
