Journalist indicted on felony rioting at Trump inauguration faces 75 years in prison
RT.com
10 Jun, 2017
A journalist has been indicted by a grand jury on felony charges that he participated in a riot while covering the protests on Inauguration day in Washington, DC. He faces 75 years in prison if convicted.
Aaron Cantu, a staff writer at the Santa Fe Reporter, was one of around 230 people arrested during protests on January 20, including six other journalists who have all had their charges dropped by February, according to the Reporters Committee for Freedom.
Cantu accepted an October 15, 2018 trial date and entered a plea of not guilty, according to the Monitor. Cantu will have a motion hearing on April 6, 2018 and a status hearing October 27, 2017.
According to the indictment obtained by the Monitor, “Cantu, and other individuals participating in the Black Bloc, brought face masks, gas masks, and goggles to eliminate or mitigate the effectiveness of crowd control measures that might be used by law enforcement.”
However, the Santa Fe Reporter says that video footage from the conservative media group The Rebel shows Cantu was “off to the side of the protests with other journalists, washing what appears to be pepper spray from his eyes.”
The indictment does not name Cantu as the cause of any of the destruction, only that he was “present while the damage happened,” according to the Santa Fe Reporter.
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