DOJ cites Justice Jackson to defend Jan. 6 penalty for North Carolina woman

The Department of Justice provided a glimpse in a court filing on Tuesday night of how it will attempt to preserve Jan. 6 cases that a pivotal Supreme Court ruling last month threatened to upend.

DOJ prosecutors wrote that in the case of Tara Stottlemyer, a North Carolina farmer and mother to a one-year-old, the defendant should continue to serve her sentence for breaching the Capitol in 2021 after she argued her conviction and sentence should be vacated in light of the high court’s ruling.

Prosecutors said the Supreme Court merely narrowed the scope of the obstruction charge Stottlemyer pleaded guilty to but that the high court did not entirely object to prosecutors using the charge in Jan. 6 cases.

The court ruled 6–3 that prosecutors had applied the charge too broadly in the case of a former police officer named Joseph Fischer and potentially dozens of others. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sided with five conservative justices, while Justice Amy Coney Barrett aligned with two liberal justices on the decision.

Jackson, however, wrote a concurring opinion that some have argued created a road map for prosecutors to keep their cases intact.

Prosecutors put Jackson’s words to use in Stottlemyer’s case, citing the liberal justice in their response to Stottlemyer to argue the defendant still may have violated the obstruction of an official proceeding statute under the Supreme Court’s more narrowed view that the charge had to involve tampering with physical records.

“‘And it might well be that Fischer’s conduct, as alleged here, involved the impairment (or the attempted impairment) of the availability or integrity of things used during the January 6 proceeding,’” prosecutors wrote, quoting from Jackson’s opinion.

In several cases involving the obstruction charge, the DOJ has recently asked federal judges in Washington, D.C., for a month or two of extra time to develop a response to defendants’ arguments that they were improperly charged.

The department had asked for 60 days of extra time in Stottlemyer’s case, but Judge Timothy Kelly determined that was excessive, resulting in prosecutors filing their first response to Stottlemyer by the judge’s deadline of Tuesday.

Stottlemyer pleaded guilty in 2022 to one charge of obstructing an official proceeding, admitting that she illegally entered the Capitol, wandered into then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) suite and the Senate Chamber, and rifled through senators’ papers. She was sentenced to eight months in prison and two years of probation.

She served her prison sentence already and is now under home detention and GPS monitoring and allowed to leave her home for work on her farm 60 hours per week. Her attorney argued that in addition to her charge and sentence being vacated, the court should also modify her current sentence to get rid of the GPS monitoring so that she can come and go to work freely for as many hours as she needs.

Prosecutors wrote that they would allow her to leave her home for up to 16 hours per day, but that her probation stipulations should otherwise remain as they were.

“Defendant contends that [factors] have now changed given the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Fischer,” prosecutors wrote. “The government disagrees. Given the remand to the Circuit and the ongoing litigation in Fischer, the government is still evaluating Fischer’s impact on this and other January 6 cases. However, as indicated above, Defendant’s conduct may very well meet the changed standard for [the obstruction statute].”

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The prosecutors’ comments suggest they will dive deeper into their arguments in the coming weeks for Stottlemyer and several others.

Kelly gave the DOJ until July 30 to respond to Stottlemyer’s broader claim that her entire conviction and sentence should be vacated.