Justice for the Capitol

A federal jury in the United States needed just two and a half hours of deliberation on Tuesday to convict the first extremist tried for crimes related to the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Guy Reffitt, 49, of Texas, was accused of five crimes that can carry up to 20 years in prison.

The sentence will be known in June.

This is the first conviction in a courtroom for those events, 14 months later, and it sends a powerful message from North American justice on several levels, mainly towards a dangerous political universe that has been trying for a year to whitewash what happened there to the view of the whole world.

Despite the lack of flashy headlines, Tuesday's ruling reveals that the prosecution has the tools to deliver justice in an enormously complicated case.

The FBI estimates that more than 2,000 people entered the Capitol that day.

Around 750 people have been arrested.

Of these, 210 have pleaded guilty and 39 have been sentenced to prison terms.

Reffitt has been the first case to come to trial, and the guilty verdict is unequivocal and conclusive.

The precedent is a warning to the 500 pending processes about the convenience of pleading guilty before risking going to trial.

Reffitt opens the door to the fact that, in the final balance, there are hundreds of culprits convicted of the coup attempt to annul the election by force.

The verdict also coincided on the date with the arrest of Enrique Tarrio, leader of the ultra Proud Boys group, a gang of extremists notorious for having received the tacit complicity of Donald Trump.

Tarrio's charges have to do with the coordination of the attack, which reveals an investigation of the deep preparation of the assault, not just the spontaneous outburst of anger by the mob.

The investigation is also reaching out to Trump's closest associates in the White House.

One last area of ​​responsibility is missing, the political one.

In early February, the Republican Party reached a new level of indignity when it called the Capitol assailants "ordinary people" and the assault itself "legitimate political speech" in a policy document.

But in parallel, the courts are finally on the way to establishing as judicial truth what the whole world saw on television: that a mob coordinated by a group of ultras tried to carry out a coup in favor of Donald Trump.