WASHINGTON — A federal judge sentenced a Marine Corps veteran to two years in prison Thursday for carrying a tomahawk into the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot.
Alex Harkrider, of Carthage, Texas, was convicted in a stipulated bench trial in January of seven counts, including felony counts of obstruction of an official proceeding and entering and remaining in a restricted building with a dangerous weapon.
Harkrider was indicted in early 2021 alongside his friend and fellow Marine, Ryan Nichols, of Longview, Texas. Nichols, who carried a crowbar to the Capitol and assaulted police with pepper spray, pleaded guilty in November to two felony counts and was sentenced earlier this month to five years in prison and a $200,000 fine.
Harkrider’s attorney, Kira Anne West, said her client had no understanding of what was happening at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and only went to D.C. because Nichols asked him to. While Nichols can be heard on videos played in court repeatedly threatening violence as he marched to the Capitol that day – at one point describing the day as the second revolution and threatening to “drag motherf***ers through the streets” – West said Harkrider never advocated for violence or joined in on what she described as Nichols’ “extremely offensive” rants.
“Alex is the follower,” West wrote in her sentencing memo. “Ryan is the leader.”
West sought a time-served sentence of roughly three months spent in jail following his arrest, citing Harkrider’s service during multiple deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan and his history of volunteer work in disaster recovery. While on pretrial release, Harkrider had been allowed to travel for volunteer work multiple times, including to Florida for two weeks to help following Hurricane Ian.
Federal prosecutors argued for three years in prison, saying Harkrider had encouraged the mob and had handed other rioters a canister of pepper spray they argued had later been used to assault police. West disputed that, saying there was no evidence of how the canister had ultimately been used.
A previous sentencing hearing for Harkrider broke down earlier this month over a dispute between West and prosecutors over whether he was entitled to a credit for saving the government the expense of going to trial. Prosecutors declined to offer the credit, and on Thursday, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he wouldn’t be applying it.
Lamberth, who was nominated to the federal bench by former President Ronald Reagan, said Harkrider’s case wasn’t an easy one for him to decide. He compared his own service during the Vietnam War to Harkrider’s deployments in the Middle East and said Harkrider should still feel proud of those.
“You’re one of the cases that makes Jan. 6 difficult for me, because you’re basically a good person who did wrong that day,” Lamberth said.
Nevertheless, Lamberth sentenced Harkrider to 24 months, or two years, in prison – at the top of his sentencing guidelines – saying the public needed to receive the message that nothing like Jan. 6 would ever be tolerated. Lamberth agreed to allow Harkrider to remain free while the Supreme Court considers an appeal to the obstruction charge used in hundreds of Jan. 6 cases, including his, and to recommend placement at a federal facility near Eastern Texas.