Mostly Peaceful BLM Protester Sentenced to Prison

The Black Lives Matter protests last year, characterized by the national media as “mostly peaceful”  and called “critically important” by then-Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, regularly devolved into riots causing an estimated $2 billion in damages and at least 25 deaths. Joshua Rhett Miller of the New York Post reports that, at least in Minnesota, some of the rioters are receiving consequences for their crimes. On Wednesday, a federal judge sentenced 23-year-old Dylan Shakespeare Robinson to four years in prison and $12 million in restitution for helping to set fire to a Minneapolis police station during rioting on May 28, 2020. Three of his buddies, also caught by security cameras setting fire to the station, are awaiting sentencing. Robinson stupidly bragged about his involvement on Snapchat.

Azi Paybarah of the New York Times reports that Robinson’s lawyer was quite unhappy that his client was getting punished, “He is bearing the sentence for the other thousand people who participated. Many others, far more culpable than Mr. Robinson, were not identified. He had no role in throwing any Molotov cocktails or constructing any or building any.”  Actually, Robinson was on video lighting the Molotov cocktails and personally setting fires inside the police station.

By the defense attorney’s logic, because everyone who attacked the police station was not arrested and charged, his client should not have been convicted and sentenced. The fact that most crimes are never solved does not support the ridiculous conclusion that the criminals who do get caught should be spared punishment. It is unlikely that this white punk gave a damn about George Floyd. I suspect that many thousands of others just like him saw the BLM Twitter alerts on these protests as an opportunity to go to the city and destroy property. One thing is certain,…there’s nothing cool about federal prison.