WASHINGTON — Jack Wade Whitton, a Georgia man who dragged an officer down the steps of the U.S. Capitol while wearing a "Trump 2020" hat on Jan. 6 and bragged he "fed" the officer to the mob, was sentenced to more than four years in prison Thursday.
"You’re gonna die tonight!" Whitton admitted yelling at officers during one of several assaults he committed on law enforcement at the lower west tunnel, the scene of some of the worst violence during the Capitol attack.
U.S. District Judge Rudolph Contreras sentenced Whitton to 57 months in prison and ordered mental health treatment. "Those videos were gruesome," Contreras said, referring to videos that showed the assault. "You really went out of control."
Federal prosecutors sought more than eight years in federal prison, saying Whitton’s brutal assault on one officer “ignited the series of vicious assaults” on officers at the lower west tunnel over a two-minute period.
“Whitton was one of the first assailants to commence what became a prolonged, multi-assailant attack on police officers, and which resulted in injury to those officers," federal prosecutors wrote. "And it was Whitton who first pulled Officer B.M. off of the police line, ‘feeding’ him to the mob, where he was beaten by other rioters. But that attack was not Whitton’s only violence that day. He returned to the Archway 20 minutes after the assault of Officer B.M., where he threatened and kicked officers. He also attempted to climb a wall in order to attack additional police officers. In the days that followed, Whitton expressed pride rather than remorse, and made light of his conduct."
Whitton’s defense wrote that he was “not interested in former President Trump or politics” but that he “acquiesced” to the desire of his “long-standing paramour” to travel to Washington for the Trump rally. His defense also blamed a combination of medications for attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and shots of Fireball for his actions. “Uninterested in the day’s events but trying to be a good boyfriend, Mr. Whitton drank less for entertainment and more to simply get through the cold and speeches at the ellipse,” his attorney, Komron Jon Maknoon, wrote.
Whitton is one of the small fraction of Jan. 6 defendants who had been held before his conviction. He pleaded guilty in September 2022, just before he was supposed to go on trial alongside several co-defendants who participated in the onslaught.
Prosecutors have charged more than 1,300 Jan. 6 defendants and have secured more than 950 convictions. About 500 people have been sentenced to periods of incarceration of a few days behind bars to 22 years in federal prison.
