A Missouri woman who was recently pardoned by President Trump for her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol was sentenced this week to 10 years in prison for driving drunk and killing a passenger in another car, nearly a year after the riot.
The woman, Emily Hernandez, 25, was seen in photos on the day of the riot standing on the Capitol grounds and proudly holding up a piece of a sign from the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that had just been smashed by another rioter.
Federal prosecutors said she had joined her uncle and his friend as part of the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol, and that she had entered Ms. Pelosi’s suite and then exited through a broken window.
Ms. Hernandez, who lived with her parents in Sullivan, Mo., and worked on a farm, had “never been political,” her federal public defender, Michelle M. Peterson, wrote in court papers. But she had been “urged on by her uncle and his friend, both of whom were considerably older than her.”
“She acted immaturely and under their influence,” Ms. Peterson wrote. “She could not regret that decision more.”
Ms. Hernandez was charged with a misdemeanor and was preparing to plead guilty when, court records show, she drove the wrong way on Interstate 44 in Franklin County, Mo., on Jan. 5, 2022 — a day before the first anniversary of the Capitol riot.
Ms. Hernandez’s car collided with another vehicle, killing Victoria Wilson, who was 32 and a mother of two, and seriously injuring Ms. Wilson’s husband, Ryan Wilson, who was driving.
While Ms. Hernandez was in the hospital for her own injuries, which included severe head trauma, investigators determined that her blood-alcohol content was .125, above the legal limit of .08 in Missouri, according to court records.
Five days after the fatal crash, Ms. Hernandez pleaded guilty in her Jan. 6 case to a misdemeanor offense of entering and remaining in a restricted building. She was sentenced in April 2022 to 30 days in prison and one year of supervised release.
In November 2022, she pleaded guilty in state court to two felony charges in the fatal crash — driving while intoxicated, causing the death of another passenger; and driving while intoxicated, causing serious physical injury.
She was awaiting sentencing on those charges when Mr. Trump pardoned her and more than 1,550 other people charged in connection with the Jan. 6 riot. He issued the sweeping grant of clemency hours after taking office on Jan. 20, declaring that those charged in the attack had been “destroyed.”
The federal pardon had no effect on Ms. Hernandez’s drunken-driving case in state court. On Wednesday, a judge in Franklin County, Mo., sentenced her to 10 years in prison.
Her lawyer, Ethan B. Corlija, wrote in court documents that she had rejected a plea agreement with prosecutors that would have resulted in a 12-year sentence, which Mr. Corlija called “grossly unfair.” He had asked the court to sentence her to 120 days, with credit for the time she had spent on an electronic monitoring device.
Mr. Corlija described Ms. Hernandez as a “kind, gentle and quiet young girl,” who felt “remorse, grief, sadness and shame.” He wrote that she “rarely drank alcohol,” and never used drugs.
“She always maintained her desire to resolve the case by accepting responsibility and pleading guilty at the earliest juncture,” he wrote.
At Ms. Hernandez’s sentencing on Wednesday, Ryan Wilson spoke of the pain and loss he had experienced after the death of his wife, as Ms. Hernandez listened stoically, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.
“No matter how loud I cried out to her, I couldn’t wake her,” Mr. Wilson said. “I couldn’t reach her because of the airbags.”
Ms. Hernandez also addressed the court, The Post-Dispatch reported.
“What I did was ungodly and I will live with that shame for the rest of my life,” she said. “I am sorry for what I did and if I could take it all back, I would.”
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