In recent years, federal prosecutors from the United States Justice Department have been pushing for significant prison sentences for individuals involved in the string of protests spurred on by George Floyd’s murder in 2020.
Among these protestors is Josie Robotin, a trans activist who was found with several explosive and flammable devices at a New Year’s Eve protest in Philadelphia. Police officers stopped Robotin at the protest and found she was carrying a Molotov cocktail, firecrackers, and flammable liquid.
Robotin was charged and pleaded guilty to possession of an unregistered destructive device.
Despite her guilty pleas, Robotin stated that she was bringing the items to a bonfire and that the police discovered them in the wrong place at the wrong time. During Robotin’s sentencing, a federal judge questioned the push to imprison the 26-year-old activist.
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The federal judge, John R. Padova, gave credit to Robotin’s story that the illicit items were simply supplies for a bonfire celebration. Despite the initial push to imprison Robotin for two years, Padova sentenced the trans activist to one day in prison.
Padova remarked that Robotin was exercising her freedom of speech and even suggested that prosecutors wanted to make an example of her. While Padova’s perspective certainly shaped the verdict, Robotin’s attorney, MJ Snyder, played a significant role in the defendant’s lighter-than-expected sentencing.
During the trial, Snyder, from the Law Offices of MJ Snyder, LLC, stated that, aside from carrying an explosive device, prosecutors had zero evidence that Robotin had a hand in the crimes that followed the protest. Snyder maintains that her client was exercising her freedom of speech properly and that no one involved in the protest tried to start a fire.
Robotin’s mild sentence is one of several similar outcomes that have gone against the wishes of federal prosecutors like Bill McSwain, who charged six individuals with arson after protests in 2020. For example, Lore Blumenthal, a woman who set two police cars on fire during Philadelphia’s George Floyd protests, was sentenced to two and a half years of prison time instead of the four years prosecutors were hoping for.
This pattern of lighter sentences is likely a result of the shift from a Trump-era Department of Justice (DOJ) to a Biden-era DOJ. In 2020, when the offenses occurred, the DOJ wanted to crack down on property damage inflicted by protestors. Now that former president Trump and Bill McSwain have left their posts, prosecutors are cutting deals with defendants and lawyers like Snyder.
