The federal trial for David DePape, the accused attacker of Paul Pelosi, is scheduled to get underway in November. And this week, Paul and Nancy Pelosi granted access to their home to attorneys defending DePape, as well as to federal prosecutors.*
On Wednesday evening, according to a court filing, House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and her husband voluntarily granted access to their home to the federal public defenders preparing DePape's defense. Attorney Angela Chuang filed the request on August 2, saying that her team needed to understand "the events that culminate in the police arriving" on the morning of October 28, when DePape was found in the foyer of the Pelosis' home struggling with Paul Pelosi over a hammer. The defense wants to take measurements and photos in order to reconstruct the "movements and spaces" of that night, Chuang said.
While allowing defendants access to crime scenes may be common in state criminal trials, it's not common in federal trials — something that prosecutors stressed when the defense made the access request last week.
Assistant US Attorney Helen Gilbert actually argued that defendants in federal trials have never been granted such access. Per Bloomberg, Gilbert told the judge at a hearing last week, "You don’t need to get into what happened in the home. It’s not like the prosecution team has been to the house – we have not."
Prosecutors now say that both teams will be getting access to the scene for their own inspections.
Both the defense and the prosecution requested a protective order from the judge, agreeing to terms surrounding the handling of the photos and information obtained from the crime scene visit. These including not allowing DePape to have copies or to have unsupervised access to the materials.
DePape's guilt isn't in much doubt — the attack itself, which left Pelosi seriously injured, bloody, and unconscious, was caught on police body camera footage and was released by court order in January. And DePape also did the defense no favors by granting a jailhouse interview to KTVU in January, in which he told reporter Amber Lee that he was "sorry [he] didn't get more of them."
"Now that you have all seen the bodycam footage, I have an important message for everyone in America: You're welcome," DePape said.
DePape spoke of people who are "systematically and deliberately" killing "freedom and liberty," and how he went to the Pelosi home in order to "have a heart-to-heart chat about their bad behavior."
DePape allegedly told Paul Pelosi that he was looking for Nancy, and when told she was out of town, he suggested he would wait there for her. According to an interview he gave police, DePape said he wanted to interrogate the Speaker and if she lied, he said he would break "her kneecaps," saying she was the "leader of the pack of liars" in Congress.
The federal trial will be occurring ahead of the state trial, beginning November 9. In federal court, DePape faces charges of attempting to kidnap a federal official, and assaulting the immediate family member of a federal official.
DePape also faces a raft of charges from the San Francisco District Attorney, including attempted murder, first-degree residential burglary, elder abuse, assault with a deadly weapon, and threatening family members of public officials.
After all of this is over, DePape will likely face prison time and then deportation. As we learned shortly after the attack, DePape is a Canadian national who had never become a legal resident of the U.S., despite living here, mostly in the Bay Area, for over 20 years.
Friends and his former lover Gypsy Taub described him as a troubled person whose politics used to be more left-wing — he was a supporter of Obama — but who had become radicalized to the right through various online conspiracies after becoming more of an online person in recent years. After years of homelessness in Berkeley, he had found a rental room in a converted garage in Richmond and had been doing carpentry work, and his friend and employer said he'd been spending a lot of time on his computer at home.
In his bizarre KTVU interview six months ago, he framed himself as a "patriot," someone who was helping to provide "water" to the "tree of liberty." And he told investigators that, like those who battled the British in the American Revolution, in the fight against "tyranny," surrendering is not an option.
Previously: DePape Spoke of 'Fighting Tyranny' As He Held Paul Pelosi Hostage, and More Details From FBI Investigation
Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
*This story has been corrected to show that both prosecutors and defense attorneys will be given access to inspect the home.