A Connecticut man who pinned a police officer against a door in the Lower West Terrace tunnel for more than two minutes was sentenced to 7.5 years in federal prison for his role in violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
The sentence handed down to Patrick Edward McCaughey III, 25, of Ridgefield, Connecticut, was among the longest given to any Jan. 6 defendant over the past 27 months. McCaughey was found guilty on nine charges in a bench trial in September 2022.
The sentence was less than half the prison time sought by federal prosecutors, who asked U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden to give McCaughey 15 years and 8 months behind bars.
McCaughey was convicted of seven felony charges: three counts of aiding or abetting or assaulting, resisting, or impeding law enforcement officers, including one involving a dangerous weapon; one count of obstruction of an official proceeding; one count of interfering with a law enforcement officer during a civil disorder; one count of disorderly and disruptive conduct in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon, and one count of engaging in physical violence in a restricted building or grounds with a deadly or dangerous weapon.
He was also convicted of two misdemeanor charges for disorderly conduct in a Capitol building, and committing an act of violence in the Capitol building or grounds.
McCaughey was arrested by the FBI on Jan. 19, 2021.
The judge also ordered McCaughey to serve 24 months of supervised release and pay $2,000 in restitution.
The case produced some of the lasting images of Jan. 6, those of Metropolitan Police Department Officer Daniel Hodges screaming in pain while being crushed between the doors by McCaughey and the crowd in the tunnel entrance to the Capitol.
“McCaughey used his riot shield to crush Officer Hodges into the metal doorframe, while yelling at the officer to ‘go home,’” Paschall wrote.
According to evidence in his trial, McCaughey taunted police at the barricades on the west front of the Capitol just after 2 p.m. on Jan. 6. When the police line collapsed and the crowd surged forward at about 2:30, McCaughey scaled the southwest scaffolding and took a selfie.
Just after 2:50 p.m., he entered the Lower West Terrace tunnel and engaged in a “coordinated ‘heave-ho’ group push by the rioters against the police line guarding the door to the building,” Paschall wrote.
After briefly leaving the tunnel, McCaughey returned and obtained a riot shield from a member of the crowd. He helped form a shield wall between the crowd and the police.
McCaughey used his shield to crush Hodges in the doorframe, while Jan. 6 defendant Steven Cappuccio removed the officer’s gas mask, took his baton, and struck him with it, prosecutors said.
McCaughey and the crowd did another “heave-ho” maneuver, worsening the crushing force against Hodges, Paschall wrote.
“The force is much greater,” Hodges testified at trial. “As there are so many people pushing forward on that one object, a hard object, unyielding, pushing into you, doing what it’s designed to do, is repel a body, but being used on the police. It’s much greater.
“It’s inflexible,” Hodges said. “There’s no good way to fight back against it, really. It just—you have to endure the pressure that it creates.”
Hodges said the crushing was not only painful, it left him defenseless.
“If I was there much longer being assaulted in such a way, I knew that it was very likely I wouldn’t be able to maintain my consciousness and become a liability to the other officers,” Hodges testified.
McCaughey also assaulted MPD Officer Henry Foulds with a riot shield when Foulds attempted to close the outer double doors, prosecutors said.
McCaughey’s mistake was in listening to “sources of information that were clearly false,” wrote Boyle, who asked McFadden for a 12-month prison term.
“This represents one of the saddest episodes in American history,” Boyle wrote. “There remain many grifters out there who remain free to continue propagating the ‘great lie’ that Trump won the election, Donald Trump being among the most prominent. Mr. McCaughey is not one of these individuals; he knows he was wrong.”
Boyle cited the case of former Trump senior strategist and popular conservative podcaster Stephen K. Bannon, who was found guilty of contempt of Congress. He called Bannon “a far more dangerous individual than Mr. McCaughey; however, he was sentenced to four months in prison.”
