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 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 should 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 spoke at length about 9/11 being an inside job, his ex-wife being replaced by a body double and his government-provided attorneys conspiring against him.
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.
In a statement after Tuesday’s sentencing, the Pelosi family said that after a grueling two years, “legal justice has been served.”
Biden’s port visit: The Biden administration is awarding nearly $3 billion to boost climate-friendly equipment and infrastructure at ports across the country, including Baltimore, where a bridge collapse killed six construction workers in March and disrupted East Coast shipping routes for months.
President Joe Biden announced the federal funding Tuesday during a visit to the city’s main port, saying the money will improve and electrify port infrastructure at 55 sites nationwide while supporting an estimated 40,000 union jobs, reducing pollution and combating the climate crisis. The presidential visit was intended to highlight efforts by Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris to promote clean energy while protecting and creating jobs.
CNN bans writer: CNN has banned conservative writer Ryan Girdusky from the network following a contentious on-air exchange in which he told panelist Mehdi Hasan that “I hope your beeper doesn’t go off.”
“Did you just say I should die?” Hasan said.
He was responding to Girdusky’s apparent reference to September’s attacks where pagers and walkie-talkies used by hundreds of Hezbollah members in Lebanon and Syria exploded simultaneously, killing 39. The attack was widely believed to be carried out by Israel.
Hasan and Girdusky were on a panel on “News Night” Monday night, talking about Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden, where speakers made a variety of racist comments and referred to Puerto Rico as a “floating island of garbage.” The panel discussion devolved into back-and-forth bickering after Girdusky said to Hasan, a commentator and founder of the media company Zeteo, that “you’ve been called an anti-Semite more than anyone else at this table.”
Host Abby Phillip said that Girdusky’s beeper comment was “completely out of pocket,” and he apologized. But after a commercial break, he was gone.
Philip apologized to Hasan and to viewers. She said Girdusky had crossed a line.
British stabbing suspect: The man accused in a stabbing rampage that killed three girls at a Taylor Swift-themed dance class in England has been charged with producing the deadly poison ricin and also faces a terror offense for possessing a jihadi training manual, police said Tuesday.
Axel Rudakubana, 18, who is charged with murdering three girls and stabbing 10 other people July 29, produced ricin that was found in a search of his home, Merseyside Police said. Police also found a computer file with an al-Qaida training manual titled: “Military Studies in the Jihad Against the Tyrants.”
The stabbing occurred on the first week of summer vacation as about two dozen young girls danced to music by Swift at Hart Space, a community center.