Michael Kunzelman/Associated Press

The judge who sentenced Alex Murdaugh on Friday to life in prison for killing his wife and son has earned attention and plaudits for his even-handed demeanor throughout the trial and for his dressing-down of the once-prominent lawyer just before he sent him to prison. Judge Clifton Newman, a South Carolina native who attended racially segregated schools in the 1950s and 1960s, addressed Murdaugh directly during roughly 20 minutes of comments that ranged from invoking the memories of the defendant's slain son and wife to lamenting what he described as attacks on the credibility of the state's justice system during the trial.

A man who identified himself as a believer in the QAnon conspiracy theory has been sentenced to three years and eight months in prison for assaulting police officers at the Capitol during last year's riot. Nicholas Languerand called himself a patriot, but the judge who sentenced him on Wednesday said the rioters who invaded the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, don't deserve that description. Federal authorities explicitly have linked more than 30 riot defendants to QAnon, the pro-Trump conspiracy theory. Languerand is the fourth rioter to be sentenced for assaulting police.

A federal judge has concluded that two neo-Nazi group members intended to engage in terrorist activity before FBI agents arrested them ahead of a pro-gun rally in Virginia. U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang's decision Monday to apply a "terrorism enhancement" in sentencing the men favors prosecutors' recommendation that both of them get 25 years in prison. Chuang is scheduled to sentence them at separate hearings on Thursday in Maryland. Prosecutors say the men planned to carry out a massacre inspired by their white supremacist ideology. Defense lawyers say an undercover FBI agent tried in vain to bait them into developing a plan for violence.

Federal prosecutors in Maryland are recommending 25-year prison sentences for two neo-Nazi group members who were arrested by the FBI ahead of a gun rights rally at Virginia's Capitol. In a court filing Thursday, prosecutors described former Canadian Armed Forces reservist Patrik Jordan Mathews and U.S. Army veteran Brian Mark Lemley Jr. as domestic terrorists who prepared for a civil war and talked about planning an attack at the January 2020 rally in Virginia. Mathews and Lemley Jr. are scheduled to be sentenced on Oct. 28 after pleading guilty to gun charges in June. They were charged along with a third member of The Base, a white supremacist organization. Defense attorneys filed their sentencing memos under seal.