Saying prosecutors should focus on Antifa, judge frees white supremacist in beating

In his sentencing memo Thursday, U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney made it clear why he was letting Tyler Laube off lightly.

It wasn’t just because of what Laube did or didn’t do – the defendant had already confessed to beating a journalist at a 2017 Southern California rally and pleaded guilty to violating riot laws as part of a white supremacist gang.

Laube deserved a light sentence, Carney said, because prosecutors should have focused on leftist groups.

In a 22-page memo, Carney repeatedly said prosecutors have “ignored” violence committed by Antifa and instead focused on targeting people like Laube – Trump supporters and members of the far right.

“Sentencing Mr. Laube to additional incarceration would only increase the disparity between his punishment and the lack of punishment (and prosecution) members of far-left groups who have committed the same violent conduct received,” Carney wrote. The sentence: time served, 35 days, rather than the six months prosecutors had sought.

The same day Laube received his sentence at the federal courthouse in Santa Ana, California, the largest-ever prosecution of members of Antifa in American history was going to trial just 89 miles away.

In San Diego, the last two defendants in the “San Diego 11” – members of Antifa charged with committing violence against Trump supporters in January 2021 – were sitting before a jury. Their nine co-defendants have already been sentenced, some of them to years in prison, for their crimes.

The two cases are not perfect parallels. Laube was charged and sentenced in federal court, while the two Antifa defendants in San Diego, Jeremy White and Brian Lightfoot, were charged by a local district attorney in state court. But both cases involve fights between the far left and the far right at protests. Both involve scraps caught on camera. Both cases focus not just on the violence but on the groups’ alleged organizing and planning before a melee.

The federal judge’s strong words – and clear political bent – are as unusual as they are uninformed, legal experts told USA TODAY.

“He’s really gone off the deep end,” said John Donohue, a professor at Stanford Law School.

Federal judges have a lot of leeway when it comes to sentencing criminals, Donohue said, and usually, they use that discretion with a lot of care and reasoning. He doubts Carney exercised such caution in the Laube case, especially given the high-profile Antifa trial in San Diego.

“It's very hard for me to believe he (Carney) really has any accurate sense about what the relative prosecutions are of people on the left and the right in these assault cases,” Donohue said. “That would take a much more sophisticated inquiry than some federal judge just opining off the top of his head.”

David LaBahn, president of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, agreed.

“It’s very disappointing for the judge to second-guess the work of the U.S. Attorney’s office,” LaBahn said. “This sounds to be very political instead of the role of the judge – calling balls and strikes, justice, equality, fairness.”

Carney’s courtroom deputy said in an email that the judge is “ethically precluded from commenting on a pending case.”

A white supremacist fight club

Laube is one of four defendants in the long-running prosecution of members of the Rise Above Movement, a now-disbanded white supremacist “fight club” that would regularly show up at protests in California elsewhere and get into fights with leftists.

After the fights at the Huntington Beach rally in March 2017, the men were originally charged in 2018 with violating federal laws against rioting and conspiracy to riot. In the last six years, Carney has twice dismissed the charges against the accused white supremacists, one of whom, RAM’s accused leader Robert Rundo, was extradited from Romania last year to face the charges.

Rundo remains in custody as federal prosecutors appeal that dismissal. Laube agreed last year to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for the beating of the journalist.

Prosecutors had asked Carney to sentence Laube to at least six months in prison. Instead, he was sentenced to time served and will pay a $2,000 fine.

Violence and extremism

Carney’s sentencing memo also described Laube’s tough childhood – he spent time homeless and his mother was an addict who at times dealt in methamphetamines – as a reason to keep the 27-year-old out of prison. But the main thrust of the judge’s reasoning pointed to what he said was inequity between prosecutions of the far-right and the far-left.

Experts almost all agree that far-right extremists vastly outnumber their counterparts on the far left and that the far right has caused more physical violence on America’s streets.

“There’s no question the far right commits the most violence and the most terrorism,” said Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism. “And there’s no comparison between far-right extremism and left-wing extremism when it comes to violence against people.”

Prosecutors are the “end user” in the criminal justice chain, LaBahn said. They can only prosecute cases that are brought to them by investigators. And if more extremists on the far right are committing crimes that are investigated, then it stands to reason that most prosecutions of extremists focus on the far right, he said.

Investigation: Calif. statehouse candidate says she didn't join Capitol riot. Video shows otherwise

This has not always been the case in America’s history, said Michael Sherwin, a former high-ranking U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., who headed up the effort to prosecute Jan. 6 rioters. Sherwin said his office prosecuted large numbers of people for crimes during the social justice protests after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 – most of whom were likely left-leaning politically, he said.

“We charged more people over the summer of 2020 than any district in the United States,” Sherwin said. “Defacing government property, assault on police officers – those were all leftists.”

The U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles, which is prosecuting the Rise Above Movement case, declined to comment on the Laube sentence.

Will Carless is a national correspondent covering extremism and emerging issues. Contact him at [email protected]. Follow him on X @willcarless.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Why Calif. judge gave a time-served sentence in extremist beating