| Antonia Hitchens
Contributing writer Late last week, David Dempsey, whom prosecutors described as “political violence personified,” was sentenced to twenty years for his intense assaults on officers at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. “Life has been a rollercoaster of highs and lows,” he told the judge during his sentencing hearing, at the federal courthouse in D.C., while his family sat listening. Dempsey is just one of more than fourteen hundred people who’ve been charged in connection with violence on January 6th; cases play out almost every day in Washington, and Americans are still being summoned back to the nation’s capital for their participation in the riot. Over the course of writing about the aftermath of January 6th, I would hear rioters described as insurrectionists or as patriots, depending entirely on who was talking. Sitting in court with defendants’ family members, during the past few months, I saw how unresolved the narrative of that day remains—at the courthouse, a judge would say that a defendant had tried to “stop democracy in its tracks”; later on, at a vigil held for J6ers, as they are called, I would hear that the same person had been there to save democracy. (More than half of self-described conservatives now say that January 6th was an act of “legitimate political discourse.”) The courthouse where the trials are taking place is just blocks from the Capitol, and the accused sit before a jury of D.C. residents—on one afternoon, the pool for jury selection included an F.B.I. forensic toxicologist who had tested the blood of one of the Capitol rioters for illegal substances and a former federal police officer who worked at the Pentagon. Donald Trump has specifically committed to pardoning just one of the Capitol rioters, but he has said on the campaign trail that he would be open to pardoning many more, even if they had assaulted officers. Among the defendants I spoke with, there is a sense of living in the bardo and waiting to find out which version of reality will win out, depending on who is elected President. Meanwhile, some family members have soured on Trump and resent the outsized role he plays in their lives. The former President has never been held accountable for the riot. As Stephanie McCurry, a professor at Columbia specializing in the Reconstruction era told me, “The criminal prosecutions are of foot soldiers, and so it’s a very unfinished, cracked process, because their leader is unrepentant. It keeps it alive and it should have been over. We’ve criminally pursued the masses, but then the person who called them remains out of reach.” Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » | 
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