Jacob Chansley at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, wearing horned headdress and carrying spear (Win McNamee/Getty Images).
With roughly 90 days to go until the 2024 presidential election, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Monday has agreed to give a spear and horned headdress back to convicted Jan. 6 rioter Jacob Chansley, also known as the “QAnon Shaman.”
As Law&Crime previously reported, Chansley asked that the federal government “return forthwith all property seized” in connection with his arrest for breaching the U.S. Capitol. He also sought to reduce his period of supervised release from three years to 12 months. Prosecutors said while they did not believe the items should be returned because they were still considered evidence, if they gave them back, it would mean Chansley must assure the court there would be no further challenges to his criminal conviction.
In a 6-page order on Monday, Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote:
Defendant Jacob Anthony Chansley stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021. In that respect, he was like thousands of others that day. But he stood out to the entire world because of his “unmistakable outfit” of “a horned coyote-tail headdress; red, white, and blue face paint; gloves; and no shirt.” [Citation omitted] In addition, he had armed himself with a serious weapon: “a six-foot pole with an American flag ziptied to the shaft and a metal spearhead fixed to the top.”
Mr. Chansley has completed his prison sentence and much of his term of supervised release. Now, he has moved for the return of his property seized and still held by the government, including his spear and helmet. Since the government has not established that it still needs these items as evidence and has not sought their forfeiture, the Court will GRANT Mr. Chansley’s motion.
Chansley was sentenced in November 2021 to 41 months in prison and 36 months supervised release. Originally facing six charges, he struck a plea deal and pleaded guilty to only one count: obstruction of an official proceeding, a charge recently narrowed by the U.S. Supreme Court in Fischer v. United States.
All told, Chansley was incarcerated for 11 months before being released to a halfway house in March 2023 so he could start his supervised release program. When he tried to end that early, prosecutors reminded Lamberth that though the judge was effusive with his praise of Chansley at sentencing — he had called Chansley’s mea culpa “the most remarkable I’ve heard in 34 years” and “akin to the kind of thing Martin Luther King would have said” — it was just two years after that when the judge expressed a certain degree of buyer’s remorse.
Lamberth had learned that Chansley gave interviews to the press that were a far cry from contrite; the defendant said that he regretted pleading guilty.
Lamberth acknowledged this in his Monday order as well as Chansley’s subsequent appeal. That appeal didn’t go far because Chansley withdrew it. But he then he moved to vacate his sentence, claiming he had new evidence to vindicate himself and further, that he had “ineffective assistance of his plea counsel.”
That motion was denied and the judge reminded Chansley of that fact on Monday — as well as his prior “disappointment that ‘Mr. Chansley has recanted the contrition displayed at his sentencing.””
In a footnote of the order, Lamberth notably included a snippet of Chansley’s statement from sentencing that had so moved the judge and came back to bite him later:
So I had to come to terms with the fact that I was in solitary confinement because of me, because of my decision. I broke the law, and if I believe in freedom, if I believe in law and order, if I believe in responsibility and accountability, then that means that I should do what Gandhi would do and take responsibility even and especially when it incriminates me,” Chansley said at sentencing. “No ifs, ands, or buts about it. That’s what men of honor do. I am truly, truly repentant for my actions, because repentance is not just saying you’re sorry. Repentance is apologizing and then moving in the exact opposite direction of the sin that you committed. And that’s what I’ve been trying to do ever since I realized the magnitude of my error and the magnitude of my mistake. [I]n retrospect, I would do everything differently on January 6. In all honesty, I would do everything differently.
Though the “QAnon Shaman” will have his iconic spear and fur-lined helmet back, Lamberth was silent on Chansley’s July request for an early release from supervised probation.
Instead, the judge said only that the government had failed to establish why Chansley’s property was “evidence” at this stage and that it was not clear to him “how Mr. Chansley could contest his conviction, as he has been sentenced, abandoned his direct appeal, and seen his § 2255 motion denied.”
“But even if the government may need to reprove Mr. Chansley’s guilt, the government has not explained why it would need his property,” Lamberth wrote, adding that it was not enough for prosecutors to suggest the government may “eventually” seek civil forfeiture.
While Chansley was the “face of the riot,” the judge wrote, and “images of him at the Capitol on that day abound,” three years have passed and prosecutors have “never sought forfeiture of the property involved in the Capitol siege.”
“As there is voluminous video and photo evidence of Mr. Chansley’s conduct, his property is of little utility for an investigation or prosecution and ‘the United States’ legitimate interests can be satisfied even if the property is returned … The Court therefore finds that the retention of Mr. Chansley’s property would be unreasonable,” the judge wrote.
Prosecutors may have an “interest” in using “the evidence of its choice,” such as a weapon used to commit an offense, he added, and “the government may well have been able to articulate a compelling reason to retain Mr. Chansley’s property.”
“But when the government has vast amounts of other evidence, it cannot defeat a Rule 41(g) motion simply by asserting its desire to retain the evidence without giving any reasons,” the judge wrote.
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