A Santa Ana man was among three January 6 defendants who were the first to be convicted at trial of assaulting police officers with pepper spray at the Capitol in 2021.
Jeffrey Scott Brown, 56, has been convicted of one count of felony assault, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers using a dangerous weapon, and one count of interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder, and related charges. But his wife, Jill Brown, says he is being railroaded.
“He didn't go inside, he didn't touch anybody, he went on his own and has never been convicted of anything before in his life but he's been sitting in jail ever since last year,” she said.
Ireland
| Ireland
Brown's co-defendants, Peter J. Schwartz, 49, of Uniontown, Penn., and Markus Maly, 48, of Fincastle, Va. were also convicted because they allegedly disrupted a joint session of the U.S. Congress that had convened to count 2020’s presidential electoral votes, which ultimately certified Biden, according to a Department of Justice press release.
Motions to change venue have been denied, according to Brown’s wife who attended Turning Point’s AmericaFest this week to raise money for his defense on the Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo.
“They say this is a fair and unbiased jury but if you went to a jury selection, you'd be shocked,” she said. “Everybody works for the government, which is the victim of this crime, or they work for the Democratic National Committee. They had to get rid of two CNN reporters who were rotating through as part of the potential jurors. Almost all of them in the jury pool are related to the federal government in some way.”
The case is being prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and sentencing has not yet been scheduled but is expected to take place in early 2023.
“It just seems like every day they're kind of ratcheting up what they're doing to these guys and this is just another step in that direction,” said Randy Ireland, a former Proud Boy chapter leader. "It's entirely political."
Some 900 individuals have been arrested in nearly all 50 states including more than 275 people who have been charged with assaulting or impeding law enforcement.
In an interview from jail on May 1 posted on Rumble, Brown characterized himself as a political prisoner.
"I've been locked up for more than nine months," he stated. "I've been moved around to five different jails and six different quarantines in six different states. Throughout this time, we've been systematically denied our civil rights along with other basic human rights that have been afforded to other prisoners in the same facilities. Our continued detainment is due to political motivations and biases. I have no criminal background. In fact, most of us don't. We're locked up being denied our bond, being denied time with our loved ones. While we spend our life savings trying to defend ourselves. I'm often asked, 'What was January 6th really all about?' and I guess the answer is fairly straightforward: 'Tens of millions of Americans witnessed an election on November 3rd, 2020 that had alarming events that clearly showed an orchestrated effort to control and change and subvert the voting process and laws to defeat Donald Trump.'"