WASHINGTON (KNWA/KFTA) — The attorneys representing Richard Barnett, the Arkansas man involved in the insurrection, filed a bail modification in the U.S. District Court in D.C., on Monday, April 5, 2021.
Barnett is the man who was seen in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office on the day of the Capitol riots on January 6, 2021.
Barnett is represented by New York-based McBride Law Firm.
In a 46-page brief, Joseph McBride and Steven Metcalf II requested their client be released on “personal recognizance,” and if not that, if he could be released into the third-party custody of his wife and be under the supervision of a High-Intensity Supervision Program (HISP) with GPS monitoring.
The defendant’s attorney’s brief included a Preamble that begins with “America is divided.” They stated, “the events that took place on January 6, 2021, did not occur in a vacuum.”
Barnett’s attorneys stated that there were incidents that built up to the actions of January 6. They listed the 2020 Memorial Day death of George Floyd, “murdered by the government on national television,” and the Black Lives Matter movement in reaction to Floyd’s death.
The attorneys described two sides of citizens, where “one side complained that they have been abused, under-hired, over-policed, unfairly targeted, mass incarcerated, and murdered by the government, for hundreds of years, simply for the color of their skin.”
Then the other side began to listen, the document stated, “consider, empathize, process, and understand, many for the first time- the unfairness of it all. And while in no way equivocating their experience to the horrors of racism, they too began to complain how they have been ridiculed and exploited for generations by America’s ruling class.”
The next court date for Barnett in May 4, 2021.
The Department of Justice has criminally charged more than 300, from dozens of states, in connection to the January 6 insurrection.
