SAN FRANCISCO — The man who was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for attacking the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer in their California home was given a life term without the possibility of parole on Tuesday following a separate state trial.
A San Francisco jury in June found David DePape guilty of charges including aggravated kidnapping, first-degree burglary and false imprisonment of an elder.
Before sentencing DePape to life for the kidnapping conviction, Judge Harry Dorfman rejected defense attorneys' arguments that he be granted a new state trial for the 2022 attack against Paul Pelosi, who was 82 years old at the time.
“It’s my intention that Mr. DePape will never get out of prison, he can never be paroled," Dorfman said while handing out the punishment. He later said, "I don’t feel sympathy for you. I feel sympathy for the victim in this case, who’s lucky to be alive.”
Adam Lipson, a San Francisco deputy public defender, had asked Dorfman to consider DePape’s mental health and isolation that made him susceptible to online propaganda.
“This is a man who has always been a peaceful, law-abiding person up until his activation,” Lipson said before the punishment was handed down.
When given the chance to address the court prior to his sentencing, DePape, dressed in prison orange and with his brown hair in a ponytail, spoke at length about Sept. 11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being replaced by a body double, and his government-provided attorneys conspiring against him.
“I’m a psychic,” DePape told the court, reading from sheets of paper. “The more I meditate, the more psychic I get.”
The judge interrupted DePape multiple times to ask if he wanted to address the jury's verdict or his conduct on the night of the attack, but DePape ignored the offers.
In a letter read in court by the victim's daughter, Christine Pelosi, Paul Pelosi called for the maximum sentence, saying the “last peaceful sleep” he had ended abruptly “when the defendant violently broke into my home, burst into my bedroom and stood over my bed with a hammer and zip ties demanding to see my wife, yelling ‘Where’s Nancy?’”
He said the attack left him with bumps on his head, a metal plate in it, dizziness and nerve damage in his left hand. Sleeping alone at home evokes memories of the attack, he said.
In a statement after Tuesday's sentencing, the Pelosi family said that after a grueling two years, “legal justice has been served.”
“Today’s sentence of life without parole gives our Pop some measure of legal justice and, we hope, a message to others that political violence against elected officials or their family members will not be tolerated, minimized or condoned," the statement said. "We must each do our part to build a peaceful democracy.”
Previously, a federal jury convicted DePape of assaulting a federal official’s family member and attempting to kidnap a federal official. In May, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison.
Although DePape expressed remorse for his actions at the federal sentencing, he did not do that on Tuesday. Judges in both cases said they could not ignore the seriousness of targeting elected officials.
Judge Dorfman on Tuesday also sentenced DePape to additional years on the other counts, but all the sentences, including the federal one, will run concurrently. He said that if an appellate court overturns his sentence of life without parole, he will ask that the case be sent back to his court for resentencing.
Lipson told reporters after the hearing that he will appeal the ruling. “This was a really tragic end to a tragic story,” he said.
The prosecutors, San Francisco assistant district attorneys Sean Connolly and Phoebe Maffei, said in a statement that the sentence reflects the seriousness of DePape's conduct and the harm he inflicted on an innocent man.
“There is no rejoicing in such cases. There are no winners," it said.
The defense argued that the state trial amounted to double jeopardy, saying that although the state and federal counts weren't exactly the same, the two cases stem from the same act. The judge dismissed some of the state charges, but he kept others that weren't covered by the federal case.
The Oct. 28, 2022, attack on Paul Pelosi was captured on police body camera video just days before the midterm elections and shocked the political world. He suffered head wounds, including a skull fracture that was mended with plates and screws.
DePape, a Canadian citizen who has been living in the U.S. for years, admitted during his federal trial that he planned to hold Nancy Pelosi hostage, record his interrogation of her, and “break her kneecaps” if she did not admit to the lies he said she told about “Russiagate,” a reference to the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
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