A federal judge rejected the Justice Department’s request to increase a January 6 rioter’s sentence on domestic terrorism grounds on Wednesday, handing the defendant instead a lesser sentence of seven years and three months in prison — the longest prison term yet for a defendant in the cases.

The defendant, 49-year-old Guy Reffitt, was the first of nine people convicted at trial so far over the January 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol. District Judge Dabney Friedrich said the harsher sentence requested by prosecutors diverged too much from other sentences in the case already handed down.

Judge Friedrich also said it was inappropriate to impose a harsher sentence simply because Reffitt opted to exercise his right to a trial, as prosecutors have threatened to do to defendants who refused plea deals.

Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Reffitt to 15 years in prison, the longest sentence sought so far among the cases. They cited Reffitt’s own recordings on the day pledging his willingness to drag Speaker Pelosi and Senator Schumer out of the Capitol “kicking and screaming” as evidence that he intended “not just to stop Congress, but also to physically attack, remove, and replace the legislators.”

The U.S. Attorney’s office in Washington, which is overseeing the investigation of the day’s events, has so far charged 840 people for their action that day. About 70 people have so far pleaded guilty to charges, and nine have been convicted after a trial. More than 330 defendants are still awaiting trial.

Only three defendants who pleaded guilty to felony charges have been sentenced, the longest to 27 months in prison. The longest sentence to date among those who refused to accept a plea agreement and insisted on trials was 63 months for two men — one from Florida and another from Washington, D.C. — who assaulted police officers with items such as a fire extinguisher and a wood plank. 

Reffitt, a 49-year-old oil worker from Texas, was convicted March 8 on five felony offenses, among them interfering with official proceedings of Congress, obstructing police business, transporting a firearm to a riot, and witness tampering for threatening his teenage son after he said he would turn his father in to the FBI. Reffitt, a member of a group calling itself the Three Percenters, was accused of being one of the mob’s principal ringleaders.

The sentence comes just days after a report out of Harvard University suggests that most of those who stormed the Capitol that day were motivated not by a desire to overthrow the government or foment a civil war, but mainly out of fealty to President Trump and frustration stemming from his claims that the 2020 election was somehow rigged against him.

For their analysis, researchers at Harvard’s Kennedy School scoured the legal charging and sentencing documents in the cases of 417 defendants accused so far of participating in the riot. The researchers said they pored over the social media posts, private messages and direct quotes attributed to the defendants in their court records to come to their conclusions.

More than 40 percent of the defendants said their primary motivation on the day was either support for Mr. Trump or anger over what Mr. Trump called a “rigged election.” About eight percent said they were there in the name of “revolution, civil war, or succession,” and just under six percent said they were there to either protect the country or “take back the country.” Another six percent were reported to have participated out of a “general interest in violence, slightly less than said they were there to protest peacefully.”

“The documents show that Trump and his allies convinced an unquantifiable number of Americans that representative democracy in the United States was not only in decline, but in imminent, existential danger,” the report concludes. “This belief translated into a widespread fear of democratic and societal breakdown, which, in turn, motivated hundreds of Americans to travel to DC from far corners of the country in what they were convinced was the nation’s most desperate hour.

“However, even while acknowledging Trump’s role as the central leader of this violent domestic attack, it is important to reiterate that our data also suggest that the Capitol attackers were motivated by a multiplicity of reasons, many of which stem from an insidious, unstated fear of losing political power and majority status,” they added.