Jacob Chansley was misrepresented by his former attorney and the media, leading his new attorneys to file an appeal of his 41-month sentence on his guilty plea from a suspect plea agreement, one of those attorneys told Newsmax on Wednesday.
"This agreement was all downside for Jacob, no upside," attorney William Shipley, who has taken over Chansley's representation along with John Pierce, told "John Bachman Now."
Pierce was a former Kyle Rittenhouse attorney, and Shipley told host John Bachman the legal representation was not only legally flawed, along with the plea agreement, but Missouri lawyer Albert Watkins also allowed a false representation of being tied to QAnon to be carried out in the media and in court.
"We're going to begin to try to address this issue is to eliminate this reference to him as the QAnon Shaman," Shipley told Bachman. "He has zero connection to QAnon."
Shipley denounced the "easy media shorthand" being weaponized against his client to get "attention real easily," but Chansley's shamanism has no connection to the QAnon conspiracy movement.
"He does practice shamanism, which is a form of a sort of a meditative religious practice, but he has no connection to QAnon," Shipley continued. "Where that ever took hold, I have no idea, but his attorney did him no favors at all by allowing that characterization to sort of dominate the manner in which he was addressing the media and in court, and it's just so far from the truth."
Chansley's part attorney allowed him to enter a plea deal that was no deal at all, giving a full guilty plea to the highest charge, which Shipley considered a very unusual way to deal. It gave away everything and got nothing.
Also, the representation by his past attorney and the media were "a disgrace," Shipley concluded.
"Jacob is a smart, intelligent, insightful young man that just there's no other way to describe it, and the way he was characterized, described by his attorney, is a disgrace," he said.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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