Background: Dale Huttle, circled in red at bottom left, jabs a long pole into the belly of a police officer defending the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Inset: Dale Huttle on Jan. 6. Photos courtesy U.S. Justice Department.
Dale Huttle, a 73-year-old man from Indiana who marched on the U.S. Capitol while carrying a flagpole bearing an upside-down American flag and then used that pole to jab into the bodies of police defending the Capitol on Jan. 6 will spend the next 30 months of his life in prison.
The sentence was announced by the Justice Department on Tuesday. Huttle pleaded guilty to a single felony count of assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers using a dangerous weapon and causing serious bodily injury last December. In addition to his 30 month sentence, Huttle will be placed on supervised probation for two years and is ordered to pay a little over $3,600 in restitution. As Law&Crime recently reported, damage to the Capitol is nowhere near being repaid in full three years and hundreds of orders for restitution payments later; it is mostly U.S. taxpayers who are on the hook for roughly $3 million in estimated damages.
Prosecutors say Huttle traveled from Crown Point, Indiana to Washington, D.C. to attend the pro-Trump “Stop the Steal” rally and afterward, he quickly joined a crowd who marched on the Capitol. He was joined by his nephew, Matthew Huttle, 41, also of Indiana. After striking a plea deal, Matthew Huttle was sentenced in November to six months in prison for knowingly entering and remaining in a restricted building or grounds.
According to federal prosecutors, it was Matthew Huttle who declared to his uncle “we’re going to see if we can get inside” as they approached the Capitol building and then initially hedged as he saw the mass of police fending off the crowd.
“We’re going to be stopped here,” Matthew Huttle told his uncle, prosecutors said. “I don’t think we’re going to get close. We’re going to have to go up the side… Cops, a lot of cops.”
But his uncle was not deterred in the slightest.
“I think we ought to bum rush the Capitol building! Arrest them all. We’ve got enough people to do that,” the then 70-year-old man said.
In a statement of offense accompanying his plea, Huttle admitted that he and his nephew assembled near the Capitol’s west front around 2 p.m. and stood with a mass of rioters. Matthew Huttle filmed the scene with his cell phone and could be heard acknowledging the lingering presence of tear gas in the air.
As the Huttles inched closer and closer to police, they and other rioters screamed: “You guys need to be patriots. Be Americans! Your country is being stolen!” and “You can’t stop a million of us! We’re taking this house, just so you know” and “Didn’t you take an oath? You’re serving the enemy,” and more.
Rioters started to grab bike rack barriers along the Capitol’s western front, attempting to break up the police line and a push-and-pull between the rioters and police erupted over the barriers. All the while, prosecutors say Huttle “stood at the front of the pack of rioters wielding his flagpole.”
As soon as a barrier came away, Dale Huttle lunged at officers and jabbed his flagpole directly into an officer, hitting him right in the stomach.
This caused the officer to lose his footing, slip and fall backwards on hard concrete and marble stairs as Huttle struck him with his flagpole. The fall caused the officer to slip a disc in his back and even today, prosecutors say the police officer has continued pain and needs consistent treatments.
Huttle also admitted that during the tug-of-war over the bike rack barriers, a Metropolitan Police department officer — only identified by initials E.F. in court records — was also knocked to the ground and as officers scrambled to stand him up, Huttle jabbed his flagpole into him, too.
Justice Department provided photo shows Dale Huttle, circled in red, using a flagpole to strike officer defending the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, circled in yellow.
“Look all the way back there, there’s a million of us, you think you can stop us? You can’t, you might as well just back off,” Huttle admitted saying after the assaults.
He also admitted to saying: “It’s going to get real ugly if you don’t let us in man” and “We’re going to push you all forward in a minute.”
With police lines broken and officers forced to retreat further up into Capitol grounds, Huttle reached for another officer’s gas mask and then, grabbed at his baton, attempting to “yank it away” from the officer.
Justice Department provided photo shows Dale Huttle grabbing at an officer’s baton on Jan. 6, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol.
“SURRENDER!” Huttle screamed, court records show. [Emphasis original]Huttle wasn’t arrested until November 2022 when authorities showed up at his job in Merrillville, Indiana. Afterward, he was interviewed by Chicago CBS affiliate WBBM in front of his home.
Justice Department provided photo shows Dale Huttle, in yellow rectangle, grabbing at a policer officer’s mask on Jan. 6, 2021.
“Those assault charges are not true, I’m going to take it all the way. I’m not cutting a deal, not true, and I’m not going to stand for it,” he said while denying that he assaulted police and telling the reporter that he wanted to see officers’ body camera footage.
“I’m going to face them in court with my attorney to cross-examine them,” he said.
“We were invited down to the Capitol by the president of the United States. We were not there illegally, we were invited by the president himself… I’m not ashamed of being there. It was our duty as patriots,” he said before then calling himself “the ultimate patriot because I put myself on the line to defend the country.”
He continued: “And I have, I have no regrets. I will not say I’m sorry.”
Last week when Huttle’s attorneys filed a 65-page proposed sentencing memorandum with presiding U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper seeking leniency, Huttle’s attorney argued that the 73-year-old “from the beginning acknowledged the wrongfulness of his conduct, although until he saw the videos he had no recollection of making contact with the officer with his flagpole.”
Federal prosecutors initially asked Cooper to sentence Huttle to 85 months, noting his lack of remorse after his arrest and the violent repeated attacks on officers.
An attorney for Huttle did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
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