“It’s my intention that Mr. DePape will never get out of prison, he can never be paroled,” Dorfman said while handing out the punishment. He later said, “I don’t feel sympathy for you. I feel sympathy for the victim in this case, who’s lucky to be alive.”
Adam Lipson, a San Francisco deputy public defender, had requested Dorfman to contemplate DePape’s psychological well being and isolation that made him inclined to on-line propaganda.
David DePape, who bludgeoned Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer, is seen on Dec. 13, 2013, in Berkeley, Calif.
“This is a man who has always been a peaceful, law-abiding person up until his activation,” Lipson mentioned earlier than the punishment was handed down.
When given the possibility to deal with the courtroom previous to his sentencing, DePape, wearing jail orange and together with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at size about Sept. 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being changed by a physique double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring in opposition to him.
“I’m a psychic,” DePape instructed the courtroom, studying from sheets of paper. “The more I meditate, the more psychic I get.”
The decide interrupted DePape a number of instances to ask if he wished to deal with the jury’s verdict or his conduct on the night time of the assault, however DePape ignored the provides.
In a letter learn in courtroom by the sufferer’s daughter, Christine Pelosi, Paul Pelosi referred to as for the utmost sentence, saying the “last peaceful sleep” he had ended abruptly “when the defendant violently broke into my home, burst into my bedroom and stood over my bed with a hammer and zip ties demanding to see my wife, yelling ‘Where’s Nancy?’”
He mentioned the assault left him with bumps on his head, a steel plate in it, dizziness and nerve harm in his left hand. Sleeping alone at residence evokes recollections of the assault, he mentioned.
Beforehand, a federal jury convicted DePape of assaulting a federal official’s member of the family and trying to kidnap a federal official. In Might, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal jail.
Though DePape expressed regret for his actions on the federal sentencing, he didn’t try this on Tuesday. Judges in each circumstances mentioned they may not ignore the seriousness of focusing on elected officers.
On this picture taken from a San Francisco Police Division physique digital camera, Paul Pelosi, proper, fights for management of a hammer together with his assailant, David DePape, throughout a brutal assault within the couple’s San Francisco residence on Oct. 28, 2022.
Choose Dorfman on Tuesday additionally sentenced DePape to extra years on the opposite counts, however all of the sentences, together with the federal one, will run concurrently. He mentioned that if an appellate courtroom overturns his sentence of life with out parole, he’ll ask that the case be despatched again to his courtroom for resentencing.
Lipson instructed reporters after the listening to that he’ll attraction the ruling. “This was a really tragic end to a tragic story,” he mentioned.
The prosecutors, San Francisco assistant district attorneys Sean Connolly and Phoebe Maffei, mentioned in an announcement that the sentence displays the seriousness of DePape’s conduct and the hurt he inflicted on an harmless man.
“There is no such thing as a rejoicing in such circumstances. There aren’t any winners,” it mentioned.
The protection argued that the state trial amounted to double jeopardy, saying that though the state and federal counts weren’t precisely the identical, the 2 circumstances stem from the identical act. The decide dismissed a few of the state expenses, however he stored others that weren’t lined by the federal case.
The Oct. 28, 2022, assault on Paul Pelosi was captured on police physique digital camera video simply days earlier than the midterm elections and shocked the political world. He suffered head wounds, together with a cranium fracture that was mended with plates and screws.
DePape, a Canadian citizen who has been dwelling within the U.S. for years, admitted throughout his federal trial that he deliberate to carry Nancy Pelosi hostage, document his interrogation of her, and “break her kneecaps” if she didn’t admit to the lies he mentioned she instructed about “Russiagate,” a reference to the investigation into Russian interference within the 2016 presidential marketing campaign.
