David DePape, the intruder who entered armed with a hammer and attacked Paul Pelosi in his San Francisco home, husband of the then speaker of the lower house of Congress, Nancy Pelosi, received a 30-year prison sentence this Friday in a federal prison.
Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley was closer to the prison administration, which recommended 25 years, than the 40 the prosecution requested. The defense lawyer, ex officio, reduced the request to 14 years.
Nancy Pelosi was then in the second line of succession when the attack occurred, raising fears of politically motivated violence in the run-up to the November 2022 midterm elections. The misdeed occurred on October 28, on the eve of those elections.
The assailant was convicted of federal charges a year later. DePape admitted during the trial that he carried out the attack, as he had previously acknowledged in police interviews and in statements to the press. He said, however, that he never wanted to cause harm to Paul Pelosi.
From the stand, the accused made reference to far-right conspiracies. He claimed to be well informed because he spent six hours a day following political commentators on YouTube, which led him to make his decision.
With his intrusion into the residence in the Pacific Heights neighborhood, DePape intended to kidnap Paul Pelosi and interrogate them about the alleged conspiracy theories that his wife and other relevant figures would have encouraged.
As a result of his attack, he was found guilty of two federal crimes: attempted kidnapping and assault on a relative of a country authority.
Their problems do not end in that jurisdiction. DePape also faces state charges as a result of his intrusion. These include attempted murder, assault with a deadly weapon and abuse of a person of a certain age. This other trial is scheduled to start on the 22nd with jury selection.
In this era marked by the lies of former President Donald Trump, the DePape case shows the great vulnerability of American politics. He is a person whose behavior was directed by conspiracies linked with many members of the far right, who use dehumanizing language to call citizens enemies like Paul Pelosi. All of this ties in with Trump’s rhetoric, which calls his rivals worms, like the Nazis did, and other things.
His defense tried to dissociate his action from the fact that the victim was the husband of a representative of the US government. But he did nothing more than dig that conspiratorial grave by alleging that DePape acted this way because he saw Nancy Pelosi as part of the Democratic elite, a sect that seeks to destroy the country, according to the defendant’s vision.
43 years old and born in Canada, the convict had lived in San Francisco for more than half his life. He is described as a solitary man, who worked odd jobs and who for a time lived under a tree in a park in Berkeley. At times he was immersed in the counterculture of the Californian Bay Area, experimenting with psychedelic drugs and participating in protests against the war in Iraq.
