Riley Williams Sentenced to Three Years

Girls Just Wanna Have Fun!

Riley June Williams, Felon

It turns out that trying to overthrow the government on a lark may be a bad idea. I've been checking in with Riley Williams for quite a while. She may or may not have stolen Nancy Pelosi's laptop (that charge was eventually dropped), but she definitely had fun in the nation's Capitol on January 6, 2021. 

I was worried early on that the Feds would tire of the workload generated by January 6 and, after a certain amount of time had passed, start to let the small-fry cases slide. Riley was my test case, and I was wrong. She was definitely never at the head of the line - other, more important, cases clearly came first - but she never fell out of the line. 

Riley was arrested on January 18, 2021, but allowed to remain at her mother's home in central Pennsylvania while her case was pending. And it pended for quite a while. I do think the prosecutors were interested in getting Speaker Pelosi's laptop back, but Riley clearly was not willing to play ball. 

She also didn't like the conditions of her home detention and quietly violated them on several occasions, presumably thinking her transgressions would not be detected. 

In America you're innocent until convicted, so at this point Riley was innocent. But, golly, she seemed blissfully unaware of how nice the authorities were being to her. The judge even allowed her to go to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. The prosecutors argued from the beginning that she was a flight risk,  and I think they would have been happier with Riley in jail.

At any rate she was finally indicted on October 6, 2021. And then the case dragged on again, eventually going to trial on November 7, 2022, in Washington, D.C. A jury found her guilty on November 21, and the judge ordered her to go to jail and await sentencing. Riley, who was 23 years old at this point, appeared shocked that she was going to jail.

On March 23, she was sentenced to 36 months in jail.

Riley strikes me as a somewhat aimless, slightly bored young person who wanted to have some excitement in her life. Nothing criminal about that, but then she seems to have fallen in with some bad company. Politico reported that she was a Groyper, which seems to mean she was a fan of Nick Fuentes, a rather appalling young man. You may recall that, late last year, he brought Kanye West to dinner with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago. 

Riley's lawyer, a hard-working Federal Defender named Lori Ulrich, did what she could, and two of the most serious charges against Riley wound up being dropped. But the evidence on the remaining charges was overwhelming, and the verdict was fair.

Jail changes people. I'd like to think that Riley will come out of the penitentiary a better person, but frankly I doubt this will happen. I don't ever expect to hear her start a sentence with, "I made some bad decisions." Instead I think she'll come out hardened and bitter. And that's a pity.

See also What a Cold Civil War Feels Like, A Shortage of Serviceable Ducks, Slingshot, A Home Invasion, As the Tide Goes Out.