Andrea Macko reports at Porcupine Soup that Coeymans Town Supervisor George McHugh was not the only local official writing to a judge urging leniency for a local man who pleaded guilty to his part of the riot in the U.S. Capitol insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Westerlo Republican Chair Lisa DeGroff and Westerlo Town Councilperson Amie Burnside also wrote letters to the judge on behalf of William Tryon, 71, of Selkirk. “There could not be a more upstanding citizen,” DeGroff stated of Tryon, who prosecutors said participated in “a violent attack that forced an interruption of the certification of the 2020 Electoral College vote count, threatened the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 Presidential election, injured more than one hundred law enforcement officers, and resulted in more than one million dollars’ of property damage.” Burnside implied that the riot was justified in her letter to the court. “Bill is simply just as frustrated as the rest of the country,” Burnside stated. Lewis County Sheriff Michael Carpinelli, who is a Republican running for governor, also wrote to the court for Tryon on official sheriff’s office letterhead. On January 14, Senior United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia Reggie B. Walton sentenced Tryon to 50 days behind bars and ordered him to serve 12 months of post-release supervision and pay $500 in restitution, a $25 special assessment, and a $1,000 fine. Read more about this story at Porcupine Soup.