Idaho woman paid $2,270 after Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Pardoned, she gets it back
When Yvonne St Cyr — one of seven people with ties to Idaho who participated in the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol after Donald Trump’s 2020 election loss — appeared before U.S. District Judge John Bates in Washington D.C., he told her just before sentencing her to federal prison that she had “little or no respect” for the law, the country’s democratic systems or the criminal justice system.
St Cyr was sentenced to 30 months in prison and three years of supervised release, and she was fined over $3,000.
“You’re not being held responsible for your beliefs. You’re not being held responsible for what you have said,” Bates said in September 2023. “You’re being held responsible for the choices you made on Jan. 6 and the conduct that you engaged in.”
Two years later — after her sentence was cut short by the sweeping presidential pardons Trump issued to all of the rioters — St Cyr, of Caldwell, went before Judge Bates again — and this time she asked for her money back.
In a motion, she asked for the $2,270 she paid to help cover the millions of dollars in damages that Trump supporters did to the U.S. Capitol while violently trying to stop the certification of former President Joe Biden’s victory over Trump. (She didn’t pay $1,000 of the fines.)
With some reluctance, Bates agreed to grant her the reimbursement.
“Sometimes a judge is called upon to do what the law requires, even if it may seem at odds with what justice or one’s initial instincts might warrant,” Bates, an appointee of Republican George W. Bush, wrote in his order. “This is one such occasion.”
During the riot, St Cyr entered the Capitol and posted a livestream video on Facebook that was “widely circulated” on other social media platforms and picked up by national news outlets. She filmed an office window getting destroyed and continued to stand in the window as she shouted to the crowd.
As Bates explained in his 15-page order, because St Cyr was actively appealing her conviction when she was pardoned, her charges were listed as dismissed — meaning the law presumes that she was not found guilty. Therefore, the government has no right to keep the money.
If St Cyr hadn’t appealed her conviction or had the appeals court affirm her prison sentence before Trump’s pardon, then she’d have “no right” to be refunded the money, he wrote.
Of the other people with ties to Idaho who were convicted for their actions that day, none have filed motions requesting their money back, according to a search of court records. But that doesn’t mean others throughout the country won’t follow suit.
The Washington Post reported that while St Cyr was the first of the Jan. 6 defendants granted a refund, at least two others are expected to get their money back. Five others have been denied their refunds but are appealing those decisions, the newspaper reported.
St Cyr was the only one who was still in prison in 2025, as the other four with convictions had been released or were on probation. Theo Hanson and Michael Pope had their charges dropped as their cases were still ongoing. Because neither had been convicted, they hadn’t paid any fines or restitution.
Pamela Hemphill, one of the seven Idahoans who participated in the Jan. 6 riot, told the Idaho Statesman that taking any money back would be a “disgrace” and that she’d never consider it. Hemphill was fined $500, which she paid.
The Boise resident, who was once nicknamed “the MAGA Granny,” found herself becoming politically involved after retiring in 2011 and became connected with far-right figures, including Idaho’s Ammon Bundy, the Statesman previously reported. But once she was released from two months in federal prison, she noticed that other rioters online were supporting the violence against Capitol police officers, and began to change her perspective on the 2020 election.
She thought of herself as being “in a cult,” she told the Statesman at the time. That mindset change led to her rejecting her pardon, and more recently testifying at the U.S. Capitol earlier this month on the fifth anniversary of the attack.
“Nobody forced anybody to do anything,” she said by phone Thursday. “We made our own choices that day.”
