The burning of the Minneapolis Third Precinct on May 28, 2020 — the uprising's most iconic act — produced the era's heaviest sentences. Federal arson carries a five-year mandatory minimum, and the men convicted for the precinct fire and the burning of nearby businesses received terms of roughly three to ten years: Dylan Robinson, who was eighteen at the fire, drew four years; Branden Wolfe forty-one months; and Montez Lee ten years for a pawnshop fire in which the remains of Oscar Lee Stewart were later found — a death the government did not charge as homicide but cited at sentencing.
The Lee case produced a rare artifact: a prosecutor's sentencing memorandum acknowledging that rioting defendants motivated by "a genuine desire to see the police reformed" differ from ordinary arsonists — even as the office sought, and received, a decade. Movement support networks adopted the uprising's imprisoned as political prisoners of the George Floyd rebellion, arguing that the state had answered the largest protest against police violence in its history by imprisoning its participants for years while the system they burned against was reformed hardly at all.