Video: Grandmother, 69, with Cancer Reports to Prison for Jan. 6 Charges, Has Message for Americans
A 69-year-old grandmother from Boise, Idaho, was sentenced in May to two months in prison for her activities during the Capitol incursion on Jan. 6, 2021.
Pamela Hemphill had no prior criminal history, and she is fighting breast cancer.
The display name on her Twitter page, PamHemphill-MAGAGranny, should tell you all you need to know.
Hemphill’s daughter drove her to Federal Correctional Institution Dublin near Oakland, California, on Tuesday, which was her “surrender date,” and shared a video of their conversation upon arriving.
“Mom, how do you feel?” she asked Hemphill.
“Scared to death. I’m frightened, but I know God’s with me. Just going to take it five minutes at a time, one day at a time,” she replied.
“Mom, what do you have to say to the American people as your last words before you go in?”
“Just keep your faith no matter what’s going on in your life,” Hemphill said. “God’s with us no matter what’s happening to us. It’s gonna be OK in our lives if we just lean on God and trust — do what’s right and help make this country better again.
“And support all those that are right now locked up in — the Jan. 6 people that are not getting any trials.
“God bless you all.”
Just arrived at FCI Dublin prison in California with J6 defendant PAMELA HEMPHILL – her last words…”GOD is with me” pic.twitter.com/F3CqjyzvtL
— Jenifa Breeze (@BreezeJenifa) July 12, 2022
According to KTVB-TV in Boise, under the terms of her plea deal, Hemphill pleaded guilty to “one misdemeanor count of demonstrating, parading or picketing in the U.S. Capitol Building.” Three earlier charges were dropped.
On May 24, she was sentenced to two months in prison and three years of probation and ordered to pay $500 in restitution by Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The prosecutor told Lamberth that Hemphill “repeatedly turned to police for help while simultaneously undermining their efforts,” KTVB reported.
He said that “many protested [on Jan. 6] without engaging the police. This defendant did not choose to take things in from a distance.”
The prosecution played a video in which Hemphill, who was filming the protest, can be heard telling a police officer, “I have to get out of that crowd.” She also told him she’d recently had surgery and that she was a journalist. He directed her to a safer area.
Shortly afterward, however, she was seen inviting protesters into the Capitol, KTVB reported.
Statement of facts in Pam Hemphill’s case have been unsealed in the DC federal court.
The document below (courtesy @ryanjreilly) has multiple pictures of Hemphill inside the Capitol on Jan. 6, including this one in the Rotunda. https://t.co/77fA3it5xA pic.twitter.com/6XIhEVx6Ec
— Jacob Scholl (@Jacob_Scholl) August 4, 2021
When the video ended, the prosecutor said, “These are not the actions of a citizen journalist. These are the actions of a rioter.”
Prior to receiving her sentence, Hemphill said, “I fully regret everything I said and did at the Capitol.”
She had planned merely to film the protest, not to participate in it. “Then the fans started going onto the field,” Hemphill said. “I should have gone home. Instead, I was there filming chaos when I should never have left the stands in the first place.”
While delivering his sentence, Lamberth said “it was tempting to be lenient in this kind of situation,” but the events of Jan. 6 were more “serious” and “didn’t equate to other demonstrations.”
He added, “In some ways when I see those videos, I want to give you the maximum.”
Lamberth was appointed by former President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
CORRECTION, July 16, 2022: The Western Journal has removed a sentence from this commentary that erroneously claimed that “Black Lives Matter rioters who caused $2 billion worth of property damage and wounded more than 2,000 police officers in the summer of 2020 never even faced charges.” In reality, multiple sources documented between 10,000 and 20,000 arrests of protesters following George Floyd’s death in May of 2020. While most of these were for various low-level offenses, hundreds involved charges of burglary and looting. Moreover, analysis found that roughly 95 percent of the protests during that period were peaceful, with protesters giving no cause for arrests or prosecution in the first place. For readers interested in more details regarding the protests and the consequences for the protesters, we recommend the list of resources compiled by USA Today, available here.
Because the last few paragraphs of this commentary were based on the premise of a “two-tiered justice system” that was implied by the supposed lack of consequences for rioters in 2020, we have deleted that portion of the piece as well.
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