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A Multnomah County Circuit Court judge this morning sentenced Texas-based former Proud Boy Alan Swinney to 10 years in prison for assaulting people on the streets of Portland during two downtown protests last summer that turned into melees.
The 10-year sentence, which Judge Heidi Moawad handed down Dec. 10 after a jury convicted Swinney of 12 criminal counts, is among the most significant penalties levied on anyone who brawled in Portland’s political protests.
Swinney’s assaults were unusually brutal.
In two days last August in front of downtown courthouses, he fired a paintball gun into a man’s face, sprayed several people in the eyes with bear spray, and aimed a loaded Ruger .357 Magnum into a crowd.
Albert Lee, a former candidate for Congress, was among those Swinney maced. Last year, he described watching Swinney aim a weapon at him, instruct other right-wing militants to charge their adversaries, then spray Lee in the face with bear repellent.
“That bear mace just covered my entire head, my eyes, my face,” Lee told WW. “There was no getting it off of you. And it gets to the point where you lose control of your body.”
Lee sued Swinney for $1.2 million. That case is ongoing.
During the Trump administration, as Portland’s downtown streets were used for war games by people who saw themselves in a proxy battle for the fate of the nation, Swinney repeatedly traveled from Texas to Portland to broadcast his exploits to other far-right nationalists.
During sentencing on Friday, senior deputy district attorney Nathan Vasquez described him as a “white nationalist vigilante cowboy.”