SAN FRANCISCO — The man who attacked the husband of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi with a hammer in their California home was given a life sentence without the chance of parole on Tuesday after a separate state trial. He had been sentenced to 30 years in federal jail for the attack.
David DePape was found guilty by a jury in San Francisco in June of aggravated kidnapping, first-degree burglary, and false imprisonment of an adult.
Before giving DePape a life sentence for kidnapping, Judge Harry Dorfman turned down the defense lawyers’ requests for a new state trial for the attack on Paul Pelosi in 2022, when Pelosi was 82 years old.
The judge, Dorfman, said, “I intend that Mr. DePape will never get out of prison; he can never be paroled.” He later told her, “I don’t feel sorry for you.” In this case, I feel sorry for the victim, who is lucky to be living.
Adam Lipson, a deputy public defender in San Francisco, asked Dorfman to think about DePape’s mental health and how being alone made him more likely to believe fake news online.
The judge said before the sentence was given, “This man has always been a peaceful, law-abiding person up until his activation.”
Before he was sentenced, DePape had a chance to speak to the court. He wore jail orange and put his brown hair up in a ponytail. He talked at length about how Sept. 11 was an inside job, his ex-wife was replaced by a body double, and his government-provided lawyers were working together against him.
DePape read from papers and told the court, “I’m a psychic.” “I become more psychic as I meditate.”
The judge asked DePape several times if he wanted to talk about the decision of the jury or his actions the night of the attack, but DePape refused all of them.
Christine Pelosi, the victim’s daughter, read Paul Pelosi’s letter in court. In it, he asked for the harshest punishment possible, saying that his “last peaceful sleep” was cut short 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 and yelling ‘Where’s Nancy?'”
He said the attack hurt his head with bumps and a metal plate, made him dizzy, and hurt the nerves in his left hand. He said that sleeping alone at home makes him think of the attack.
After the sentence on Tuesday, the Pelosi family said in a statement that “legal justice has been served” after two hard years.
The statement said, “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, downplayed, or condoned.” “We all need to do our part to make the world a more peaceful place.”
A federal jury had already found DePape guilty of attacking a family member of a federal official and trying to kidnap a federal official. He was given 30 years in federal jail in May.
At the federal sentence, DePape said he was sorry for what he did, but he didn’t do that on Tuesday. Both times, the judges said they couldn’t ignore how serious it was to target elected leaders.
Judge Dorfman gave DePape more time in prison on Tuesday for the other charges as well, but all of his terms, including the federal one, will run at the same time. He said that he would ask for the case to be sent back to his court for a new term if an appellate court overturned his sentence of life in prison without the chance of parole.
After the meeting, Lipson told reporters that he will file an appeal. He said, “This was a really sad ending to a sad story.”
In a statement, Sean Connolly and Phoebe Maffei, assistant district attorneys for San Francisco, said that the sentence shows how bad DePape’s actions were and how much harm he caused to an innocent guy.
“In these situations, there is no joy.” “There’s no winner,” it read.
The defense said that the state trial was the same as being tried twice for the same crime, even though the state and federal courts were not the same. The judge threw out some of the state charges but kept the ones that didn’t fit with the federal case.
The attack on Paul Pelosi on October 28, 2022, was caught on film by police body cameras just days before the midterm elections. The attack shocked people in politics. He got hurt in the head and had a brain fracture that was fixed with plates and screws.
In his federal trial, DePape, a Canadian citizen who has lived in the U.S. for years, admitted that he planned to “break her kneecaps” and hold Nancy Pelosi, hostage while recording his questioning of her. He said this because he thought she would not admit to the lies he said she told about “Russiagate,” the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
