When people ask me why I despise the government, stories like this come to mind.
A Falcon, Colorado, woman convicted for entering the United States Capitol building on Jan. 6, 2021 while the riot was occurring was sentenced on Monday to one year of probation.
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Rebecca Lavrenz, known as “J6 Praying Grandma” on social media, is also being forced to fork over $103,500 in fines after being convicted of four misdemeanor counts, the Colorado Sun reported.
In a Facebook post before the ruling, the 72-year-old great-grandmother, who operates a bed and breakfast northeast of Colorado Springs, offered no apologies for her crimes and said she felt the judge’s decision was in God’s hands.
“I am confident that his sentence will be what God, the Highest Judge, thinks is best to wake up our country,” Lavrenz wrote Monday morning. “Trusting and obeying God is my assignment for today.”
Lavrenz’s defense attorneys requested a one-year probation, no fine and no restitution, in court documents filed last week. They argued that she was a retired, first-time offender with “countless ties” to her community and commitments to her extended family.
Her attorneys said that Lavrenz’s conduct Jan. 6 was peaceful and nonviolent, that she caused no property damage and that she complied with the conditions of her release over the past two years after she was arrested in 2022, according to court documents.
On the other hand, federal prosecutors asked the judge to throw Lavrenz in a cage for ten months and put her on supervised release and 60 hours of community service. They argued that she has been “one of the loudest public voices calling the prosecution of January 6 riots a corrupt exercise.”
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The prosecutors acknowledged Lavrenz’s First Amendment rights but insisted that “her unrepentant promotion of the riot is powerful evidence that she continues to pose a threat to future acts of political violence like that which engulfed the nation on January 6.”
That’s right folks. These smarmy, feckless tyrants want to put a 72-year-old grandmother behind bars because she walked around a building and said mean things about the government’s treatment of folks like herself.
Even further, prosecutors argued in favor of the fine because the defendant – wait for it – participated in interviews and used online fundraising accounts to supposedly seek “celebrity status” for her supposed criminality. How dare she try to raise funds for her legal defense, right?
This is clearly an effort to erase the money she managed to raise to defend herself from the government and has nothing to do with justice.
And this, dear reader, is why I hate the government with the passion of a thousand burning suns. For starters, the notion that the prosecution would seek even harsher punishment is bad enough. But what is truly galling is that this is even a case in the first place.
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Lavrenz violated nobody’s rights. She did not participate in violence. She did not incite violence, nor did she steal or destroy any property. She walked around the halls of the Capitol building and prayed. This is a disgusting example of using the power of the government to punish people for their political views.
The state should never be powerful enough to be used against citizens in this manner – especially those who have not harmed anyone. Unfortunately, Lavrenz is not the only one. People get railroaded by government at the federal, state, and local levels on a daily basis.