Jan. 6 defendant Jake Lang pursues legal battle over police brutality

Jake Lang saw the Supreme Court rule in his favor last year, when the justices nullified a key criminal charge brought by the Biden Justice Department against defendants in its prosecution of the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Now Mr. Lang is back, asking the justices to revive another case of his — a lawsuit alleging police brutality on that fateful day.

A U.S. district judge dismissed his case, saying he didn’t comply with procedural rules and missed the deadline for correcting his errors.

But Mr. Lang says he deserves consideration because he has a good reason for missing the deadline: He was in solitary confinement while awaiting trial.

“I was on the rooftop of Brooklyn federal prison,” Mr. Lang told The Washington Times. “They threw out my lawsuit … because I wasn’t able to answer my phone. Do these people not know I was incarcerated in solitary confinement?”

His criminal case was voided by President Trump’s Inauguration Day pardon.

But Mr. Lang says he has unfinished business with the police officers who he said used excessive force at the Capitol and the police officials who ordered them to defend the building against the rioters.

He’s not alone.

Other Jan. 6 defendants are still arguing issues. William Pope has been battling with the Department of Justice over access to notes he wrote on government documents that the DOJ says he cannot take possession of.

Mr. Pope, who is representing himself, had won the dismissal of several charges brought against him, and he was convinced he was going to defeat the others when Mr. Trump’s pardon came through.

He has repeatedly tweaked the government’s nose in his court filings, such as his notice of appeal in which he proclaims, “I defeated all of the allegations but am trying to resolve remaining matters.”

Mr. Lang, for his part, is using his abuse lawsuit to proffer a different perspective on the events of Jan. 6 than the version the Biden Justice Department presented.

“We are ordered to believe that unarmed demonstrators planned to overthrow the U.S. government in only a few minutes, during which most of them walked politely between the velvet ropes, chatted calmly with police officers, admired the architecture, kneeled and prayed and took photographs of each other,” his lawyer, Edward Lacy Tarpley Jr., told the justices in his petition for them to order his case reinstated.

The lawyer said things turned violent for a hundred or so of the demonstrators “when they were attacked by amped-up police officers.” He said calls of “shots fired” over police radios fed the chaos — though the shots were the ones officers themselves fired “at unarmed civilians.”

“Whereas building security cameras show peaceful interactions in most places, they also show unprovoked police brutality and attacks on demonstrators that turned into brawls,” Mr. Tarpley said.

The police brutality lawsuit Mr. Lang wants reinstated demands that the court confront the argument that it was police officers who “initiated violence on January 6.”

He and fellow Jan. 6 protesters who joined him in his lawsuit sued the U.S. Capitol Police, the Metropolitan Police Department and their leaders, as well as individual officers.

For the justices, the question is whether Mr. Lang should be denied the chance to pursue his lawsuit because his incarceration caused him to miss court-imposed deadlines for filings.

It would take four justices to vote in favor of hearing Mr. Lang’s case.

In his previous go-around at the Supreme Court, Mr. Lang and two other Jan. 6 defendants saw the justices throw out an obstruction of justice charge that Biden prosecutors had used against hundreds of demonstrators and Mr. Trump himself.

Federal prosecutors had argued the 2002 law, enacted in the wake of the Enron accounting scandal and designed to capture conduct where someone ordered another person to disrupt a probe, applied to the Jan. 6 protesters since their riot disrupted Congress’ verification of Electoral College results for hours as lawmakers scurried for cover.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. said the Biden Justice Department misread the scope of the law.

“If Congress had wanted to authorize such penalties for any conduct that delays or influences a proceeding in any way, it would have said so,” the chief justice wrote.

The current case is Edward Jacob Lang v. Daniel Thau. Sgt. Thau is a D.C. police officer.

Nearly all of the Jan. 6 defendants were pardoned once Mr. Trump took office in January.

Mr. Lang said he would like the president to invite the pardoned defendants to the White House early next year.

“It would be so beautiful this Jan. 6 — the five-year anniversary, the first anniversary we’ve been home — if President Trump could bring us to the White House,” he said.