A federal judge on Wednesday unloaded on a Florida Trump supporter who used a police baton to strike an officer during the January 6 Capitol insurrection and then kept it as a possible “trophy” as he rejected the MAGA rioter’s request to be released on bond.
Citing newly released court documents, the Associated Press reported that “Mason Joel Courson, 26, of Tamarac, Florida was arrested December 15 on multiple assault charges for an assault of a Metropolitan Police Department officer who was beaten by a group armed with a baton, flagpole and crutch.”
Courson also was accused of having taken part in “heave ho” efforts to breach a tunnel at the Capitol, the report said per The Raw Story.
But today, RS pointed out a new report from Courson’s hometown newspaper — the Tamarac Talk–, which “advanced the story with this reporting from December 23 court records that had not previously received coverage.”
“Prosecutors argued before a federal judge that Courson posed too serious a threat to the public to be released on bond, and the judge hearing the evidence agreed, court records show,” the newspaper reported.
“I find it significant that [Courson] kept the baton with which he assaulted [the officer],” U.S. Magistrate Judge Jared M. Strauss wrote in a Dec. 23 detention order issued in federal court in Fort Lauderdale. “Whether [Courson] intended to keep it as a trophy or a memento, I cannot determine. However, the fact that [Courson] kept that weapon over the course of the last year is not emblematic of someone who has remorse or has come to regret his actions after the passions of the moment have subsided.”
“For all of these reasons, I find that [Courson’s] character and history provide significant doubt for whether he would respect and abide by conditions of bond that I could set.”
There was also this from the judge:
“[Courson] was among those seeking to ‘battering ram’ their way through officers protecting the entrance and actually entered the Capitol,” Strauss wrote. “Even more significantly, he attempted to injure another person–specifically [one] officer…by striking him with the baton and [a second] officer…by assisting in dragging him down the stairs.”
In his ruling, the judge cited “clear and convincing evidence indicates [Courson] took part in what can only be described as an armed insurrection against American democracy,” Strauss said in his order rejecting bond for Courson.
Needless to say, his bond was rejected.
