![](\"https:\/\/img.huffingtonpost.com\/asset\/60d0efa0260000922451a920.jpeg?ops=scalefit_720_noupscale\")
<\/p>\nAt first glance, you might mistake them for student\u2019s book reports: extra-wide margins, awkward prose, an inflated summary leading up to a personal takeaway. One report focuses on the film \u201cSchindler\u2019s List,\u201d the other on the book \u201cJust Mercy\u201d by Bryan Stevenson. The report\u2019s author also read the book \u201cBury My Heart at Wounded Knee\u201d and watched Netflix\u2019s \u201cMudbound,\u201d the PBS documentary \u201cSlavery By Another Name,\u201d and the History Channel\u2019s \u201cBurning Tulsa.\u201d She, like many students, preferred to take the cinematic route. \u201cI chose the movie whenever possible because it sinks in better,\u201d she wrote.<\/p>\n
The court case numbers in the header are a bit of a giveaway. The reports aren\u2019t the work of a student with a socially conscious history teacher \u2015 they\u2019re the product of 49-year-old Anna Morgan-Lloyd, a Donald Trump supporter from Indiana who entered the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack.<\/p>\n
This week, Morgan-Lloyd will become the first of nearly 500 defendants arrested in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to face sentencing. She wants a judge to know she\u2019s changed, and her book report-style filings are meant to illustrate that growth.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve lived a sheltered life and truly haven\u2019t experienced life the way many have,\u201d Morgan-Lloyd wrote\u00a0to the judge. \u201cI\u2019ve learned that even though we live in a wonderful country things still need to improve. People of all colors should feel as safe as I do to walk down the street.\u201d<\/p>\n
The remedial social studies program that Morgan-Lloyd is following was created by her D.C.-based lawyer, H. Heather Shaner. Defense attorneys in the nation\u2019s Capitol aren\u2019t exactly a core part of Trump\u2019s political base, as many have made clear in court filings in which they\u2019ve blamed Trump for leading their clients to the edge by convincing them that the 2020 election was stolen. Some private D.C. defense lawyers told HuffPost after Jan. 6 that they were refusing to take Capitol attack cases outright.<\/p>\n
Shaner is one of many D.C. lawyers assigned to represent Capitol defendants who can\u2019t afford their own attorneys, as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and as laid out in the Criminal Justice Act. In addition to representing her clients in court, Shaner has seized an opportunity to try and educate them on the history their teachers glossed over.<\/p>\n
Shaner regularly sends her clients who are incarcerated pretrial books to read: \u201cThey\u2019re a captured audience, and it\u2019s life-changing for a lot of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
But she decided to take an even more intensive approach with her Capitol clients, who were part of another ugly, historical event in American history.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u201cReading books and then watching these shows is like a revelation,\u201d Shaner told HuffPost. \u201cI think that education is a very powerful tool … So I gave them book lists and shows that they should watch.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to Morgan-Lloyd,\u00a0Shaner represents Capitol defendants Annie Howell, Jack Jesse Griffith (aka Juan Bibiano), Israel Tutrow and Landon Kenneth Copeland, a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder who had a major episode during a virtual hearing in his case and cursed out everyone on the call. (Copeland, who was filmed assaulting officers at the Capitol on Jan. 6 and is facing the most serious accusations of any of Shaner\u2019s Capitol clients, was ordered to undergo a competency evaluation and remains in custody.)\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shaner said her clients had poor educations and knew very little about the country. Her two female clients took to the task with zeal, Shaner said, and got library cards for the first time in their lives.<\/p>\n
\u201cBoth my women are like, \u2018I never learned this in school. Why don\u2019t I know about this?\u2019\u201d Shaner said. (A couple of the male clients weren\u2019t quite as eager students, she said. \u201cThe men are very much like \u2018Oh, I\u2019ll get to it.\u2019\u201d But she said some of her male clients have been doing some self-education.)<\/p>\n
The educational program is unlikely to have much of an ultimate impact in the sentencing of a defendant like Copeland, who is charged with assaulting officers at the Capitol. But for a client like Morgan-Lloyd \u2015 an apologetic Capitol defendant not accused of any violence, who pleaded guilty only to a \u201cparading\u201d charge that a more typical protester might receive for interrupting a committee hearing \u2015 it might have some impact.<\/p>\n
Back in early January, Morgan-Lloyd accompanied her QAnon-obsessed hairdresser to show for a support for Trump, who she believed was \u201cstanding up for what we believe in.\u201d Now, she says, she accepts President Joe Biden as the nation\u2019s leader, and she\u2019s learning some lessons about the uglier parts of American history she\u2019s just learning about.<\/p>\n
Morgan-Lloyd told the court\u00a0she\u2019s a grandmother from a \u201cvery small town\u201d in southern Indiana filled with \u201csimple people who love our country.\u201d She wrote that \u201cSchindler\u2019s List\u201d was very moving, and made her wonder how people could deny that the Holocaust happened or, like her half-German son-in-law claims, according to her report, say that \u201c\u2018Only\u2019 a million Jews died.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morgan-Lloyd wrote that reading\u00a0\u201cJust Mercy\u201d \u201cmakes me reconsider my view on the death penalty\u201d because it \u201cwas far too easy for the people to convict a man of a crime that he could not have committed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shaner told the court the process helped Morgan-Lloyd \u201ceducate herself and to learn the American history she was not taught in school.\u201d Like any good defense attorney, she paints a sympathetic portrait of her client: pointing out how Morgan-Lloyd lost her job after General Electric shipped it overseas, how she was thrown right into motherhood after marrying her husband, now helps take care of her grandchildren, and how her \u201chusband and family are the world to her.\u201d<\/p>\n
Shaner has been practicing law in D.C. for decades: A search of digitized federal court records alone pulls up more than 200 cases dating back to 1990. She also occasionally teaches at her granddaughter\u2019s school, where she says she\u2019s spoken frankly about America\u2019s origins.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m allowed to say what the teachers aren\u2019t, because I\u2019m not an employee,\u201d Shaner said. \u201cI told them what my mom always told me, which is that this is the most wonderful country in the world, it\u2019s been great for all kinds of immigrant groups, except for the fact that it was born of genocide of the Native Americans and the enslavement of people.\u201d<\/p>\n
A teacher at her granddaughter\u2019s school, Shaner said, told her afterwards that she was overcome with emotion to hear a white person acknowledge that the country was funded through genocide and enslavement.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Shaner has strong political differences with her Capitol defendants, and said the trips to the Capitol building made her wonder how anyone could attack such a breathtaking building.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cYou walk, and you\u2019re in awe. You look at a group of attorneys and investigators taking photographs of the tile work and the ceilings and the statutes and you understand why all the people who went in were doing that, because it probably was their first exposure to something so beautiful,\u201d Shaner said. \u201cYou can\u2019t conceive of how anyone would defile it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like many Capitol protesters who protest under ordinary circumstances by interrupting a congressional hearing, Morgan-Lloyd is unlikely to receive any significant period of incarceration. Justice Department prosecutors, in the first sentencing memo for a Jan. 6 defendant, suggested the judge give Morgan-Lloyd three years of probation, $500 in restitution, and 40 hours of community service. (Three years\u2019 probation is double the 18-month maximum term of probation that Morgan-Lloyd could be sentenced to if she was also sentenced to any period of incarceration.)<\/p>\n
Prosecutors noted that Morgan-Lloyd was locked up for about two days after her arrest and that \u201cany period of incarceration can be eye-opening and serve as a deterrent to future criminal conduct\u201d for a defendant like Morgan-Lloyd with no prior criminal history. But they made it abundantly clear that they\u2019re taking Jan. 6 seriously.<\/p>\n
\u201cTo be clear, what the Defendant initially described as \u2018the most exciting day of [her] life\u2019 was, in fact, a tragic day for our nation \u2014 a day of riotous violence, collective destruction, and criminal conduct by a frenzied and lawless mob. The individuals the Defendant described as \u2018Patriots\u2019 were, in fact, rioters breaking windows, destroying government property, and assaulting law enforcement officers,\u201d Assistant U.S. Attorney Joshua S. Rothstein wrote in a memo that described Jan. 6 as \u201can infamous day in American history \u2014 the day on which the temple of American democracy was overrun and desecrated by rioters seeking to disrupt the lawful and peaceful transition of power.\u201d<\/p>\n
Morgan-Lloyd\u2019s court case will likely be over soon, and it remains to be determined whether she\u2019ll continue her educational process while serving her sentence. Morgan-Lloyd was supposed to be sentenced on Friday, but the plea and sentencing hearing has been rescheduled for Wednesday afternoon. The judicial system had one more lesson for Morgan-Lloyd. President Joe Biden had just signed a new law: the court was closed for Juneteenth.<\/p>\n