A federal judge in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday dismissed a case against a January 6 defendant from the Chicago area, but refused to do so with prejudice in an angrily worded order days after President Donald Trump’s clemency decision.
“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have
administered justice without fear or favor,” U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote. “The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”
Though the refusal to drop the matter with prejudice is mostly symbolic in the face of a pardon, such an order normally would leave a theoretical door open for prosecutors to again bring charges against John Banuelos, of Summit, one of more than 50 Illinois residents charged in the insurrection. Federal prosecutors previously accused Banuelos of civil disorder and discharging a weapon in or on Capitol grounds.
Chutkan noted that the government’s only reasoning for dropping the case was an exercise of power from the president.
“The Court does not discern—and neither party has identified—any defect in either the
legal merits of, or the factual basis for, the Government’s case,” she wrote.
Prosecutors alleged Banuelos fired a gun twice during the riot at the Capitol.
If convicted, Banuelos, who was arrested in Summit, could have faced up to a decade in prison. As with other cases charged in connection with the Capitol attack, his case had been moved to Washington.
“The dismissal of this case cannot undo the ‘rampage [that] left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage,’” Chutkan wrote in the order, adding, “It cannot diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers who ‘struggled, facing serious injury and even death, to control the mob that overwhelmed them.’ It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake. And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power.”
NBC News in 2022 identified Banuelos as a man arrested in a fatal stabbing of a 19-year-old in a park in Salt Lake City in July of 2021. When questioned by Salt Lake City police, NBC reported, Banuelos indicated he knew the FBI may be looking for him in connection with the riots.
“I was in the D.C. riots. You can look me up, OK?” he told police, according to NBC.
The status of the Utah case was not immediately available.
