A former Boston police officer who assisted victims in the deadly 2013 Boston Marathon bombing carried out by two Islamic militants and helped track the bombers, has been sentenced to 20 months in prison for his actions in the Jan. 6, 2021 (J6) U.S. Capitol riot.
Joseph Robert Fisher, 52, who retired as a decorated police officer after serving 20 years with the Boston Police Department, was sentenced to 20 months in prison, 24 months of supervised release, and ordered to pay $2,000 in restitution by U.S. District Judge Randolph D. Moss.
Federal prosecutors had asked for a 3½-year sentence in the case. Mr. Fisher pled guilty on Feb. 1, 2024, to two felony charges of civil disorder and assaulting, resisting, or impeding certain officers. He was sentenced on May 24 on charges of breaching the Capitol and also for assaulting a Capitol police officer with a chair.
In a May 17, 2024 letter he sent to the presiding judge a week before his sentencing, the retired K-9 officer said he was “deeply ashamed” of his actions and apologized to the officer he rammed with a chair.
“In addition to harming the officer, I know that my actions also harmed the country because of the effect the disorder had on the election process,” said Mr. Fisher. “I crossed the line from peaceful assembly to illegal behavior. My conduct on that day was simply unacceptable.”
Mr. Fisher also reflected on the harm to his “beautiful wife and two children” as well as an animal sanctuary that he said will “suffer in his absence.”
According to Mr. Fisher, during his incarceration, he will be losing a disability pension he uses to fund the sanctuary.
He mentioned little about his 20 years as a Boston police officer, saying only in his apology to the Capitol police officer that he too had been “assaulted and interfered with just for simply” doing his job.
In a May 20, 2024 memorandum seeking leniency, Mr. Fisher’s court-appointed public defender, Joshua Hanye, cited examples of bravery and compassion by Mr. Fisher during his career in law enforcement.
These included providing food and shelter to a Montreal family visiting the U.S. who found themselves unexpectedly stranded and sleeping in their car.
Mr. Fisher stopped a woman on a suicide mission from swallowing glass, Mr. Hanye said.
The veteran cop also had received credit for his role in helping Boston Marathon bombing victims and using his police dog to track down bombers Tamerlan Tsarnev and his younger brother Dzhokhar.
“Most residents of the city and surrounding areas were told to shelter in place, while Officer Fisher and other first responders ran towards the emergency, rather than away from it,” Mr. Hanye wrote in the sentencing memorandum.
On April 15, 2013, the two brothers, natives of Chechnya, detonated two pressure cookers filled with explosives, nails, and other shrapnel near the finish line of the fabled Boston Marathon. They killed three people including an 8-year-old boy and maimed dozens.
Many lost limbs including both of their legs in the blasts.
After the bombing, the two brothers ambushed an MIT campus police officer patrolling neighborhoods in search of them and shot him point blank in the face. The hunt for the brothers came to a head in a shootout with police. Tamerlan died at the scene after being shot and run over by Dzhokhar.
Dzhokhar was sentenced to death, although his sentence is currently under appeal.
Three of his friends who hid evidence in the aftermath of the bombing were also convicted in the case. Two of them received the same prison sentence that federal prosecutors sought against Mr. Fisher for his role in the J6 protests.
The government argued that Mr. Fisher deserved a harsher sentence because he attended the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Capitol breach and also helped another protester escape from Capitol police.
The Stop the Steal rally was held as Congress tallied Electoral College votes in the 2020 presidential race. Protesters wanted the process halted until evidence of alleged vote fraud had been more thoroughly vetted.
Mr. Fisher is the second New Englander in the past two weeks to be either convicted or criminally charged over their roles in the J6 protests.
Last month, a man from Kittery, Maine, was arrested on charges of being in a restricted area during the protests.
Mr. Fisher is one of a handful of off-duty police officers who have been convicted for participating in the Capitol breach.
One of them, Sgt. Thomas Robertson, was an active duty police officer in Virginia when he was sentenced in 2022 to more than seven years for playing a role in riots that day.
Mr. Robertson, also a U.S. veteran, received a lengthier sentence than others because prosecutors argued that he entered a restricted area with a dangerous weapon—a large wooden stick. Others have received much longer sentences—up to 22 years.
More than 1,200 people have been brought up on charges related to the J6 protests.
In seeking a lighter sentence for Mr. Fisher, Mr. Hanye pointed out that the Boston police officer was already suffering from work-related mental health problems when he developed severe post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) from the carnage he witnessed following the April 15 explosion of the bombs at the Boston Marathon.
There have been widely publicized reports of other officers as well as civilians who developed PTSD related to the bombings.
