WASHINGTON — A supporter of Donald Trump who attacked police at the Capitol on Jan. 6, including a Capitol police officer he helped knock unconscious when her head hit a metal railing, was sentenced Thursday to eight years in federal prison.
Stephen Chase Randolph, a 34-year-old Kentucky man, was originally identified after a facial recognition search matched an image of him inside the Capitol to a photo from his girlfriend’s Instagram page. He was convicted after a trial last year on charges of misdemeanor civil disorder, as well as assaulting an officer with a deadly or dangerous weapon and assaulting, resisting or obstructing another officer.
Three of Randolph’s co-defendants — men who helped engineer the initial breach of the Capitol grounds — were also sentenced Thursday: James Tate Grant to three years; Jason Benjamin Blythe to 30 months; and Paul Russell Johnson to five years of probation with occasional weekend confinement during the first year, along with two additional years of home confinement.
Another co-defendant, Ryan Samsel, who held a giant flag depicting Trump as “Rambo” before attacking officers on January 6, is scheduled to be sentenced on February 4, 2025.
Randolph’s eight-year sentence is one of the longer sentences given to a rioter who was not part of the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers conspiracy cases. Only a small number of individual rioters who were not charged in conspiracy cases have received longer sentences. Among them: David Dempsey, who repeatedly attacked officers in the lower west tunnel to the Capitol, received 20 years; Peter Schwartz, received 14 years; Danny “DJ” Rodriguez, who saw Trump as a father figure and drove a stun gun into the neck of former officer Michael Fanone, received 12.5 years; Christopher Quaglin, received 12 years; and former New York City Police Department officer Thomas Webster, received 10 years.
The trial of Randolph, Grant, Blythe, Johnson and Samsel featured dramatic testimony from the first officer known to have been injured during the riot: Caroline Edwards. Edwards, who testified before the House committee on Jan. 6 in June 2022, testified at the men’s trial last October. She said she was knocked unconscious briefly when she hit her head on a railing after Randolph and other rioters pushed a bike rack into her during the initial breach of the barricades.
“The lights were on,” Edwards said, describing her mental state after hitting her head, “but no one was home.”
When FBI agents went undercover to talk to Randolph in April 2021 at the grocery store where he worked, he recalled seeing “a female police officer getting punched” and said she must have suffered a concussion because she was “just [laid] “There in the fetal position.” Edwards testified about the ongoing impact of the attack, saying she was in “excruciating” pain that required physical therapy and kept her at a desk for a year and a half.
Randolph also attacked another officer after he climbed over a bike rack, one of several used by police to keep rioters away from the Capitol. Federal prosecutors said it was clear he showed no remorse. “It was f—ing fun,” Randolph boasted to one of the undercover officers before he was arrested.
After his arrest, federal authorities said Randolph downplayed his behavior and lied during questioning by the FBI.
“Can’t you just say, we’ve already accepted defeat, we lost, Joe Biden is president, hooray,” Randolph said during his interview, according to the FBI.
Randolph struck a different tone in a recorded phone call from a Kentucky detention center, prosecutors noted.
“I got caught up in the heat of the moment, everyone was cheering and chanting and screaming,” he said. “It just washed over me and I grabbed the fence and started shaking everyone. The woman just fell and hit her head. It’s just a disaster, I feel so bad.”
Randolph’s defense team said the Kentucky man did not bring tactical gear to Washington on Jan. 6, as others did, and that he “clearly got caught up in the mob mentality” after going to Trump’s Jan. 6 speech. He saw the trip as a “vacation” and a “break.”
“For him, it was a unique opportunity to see Trump speak in Washington DC,” they wrote.
About 1,500 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and federal prosecutors have convicted more than 1,000 suspects and given hundreds of prison sentences ranging from a few days in jail to 22 years in federal prison.
Trump called the Jan. 6 rioters “political prisoners,” “hostages,” “warriors” and “incredible patriots” and said he would pardon at least “a significant portion” of them as one of his first acts in office if elected in November. The former president faces felony charges for his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and retain power; he has pleaded not guilty.
A federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan said earlier this year that the “destructive, misleading rhetoric” used by some Republicans poses a danger to the country and that their “ludicrous” claims are an attempt to “rewrite history” regarding the January 6 attacks.
“The Court is accustomed to defendants refusing to acknowledge that they have done anything wrong,” said Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth. “But in my 37 years on the bench, I cannot recall a time when such baseless justifications of criminal activity have become mainstream.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
