A man who attacked police officers with poles during the riot at the US Capitol was sentenced on Tuesday to more than five years in prison, matching the longest term of imprisonment so far among hundreds of Capitol riot prosecutions. Mark Ponder, a 56-year-old resident of Washington, DC, said he "got caught up" in the chaos that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, and "didn't mean for any of this to happen," the AP reports. "I wasn't thinking that day," Ponder told US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, asking her for mercy before she sentenced him to five years and three months in prison.
That was three months longer than the prison sentence requested by prosecutors. And it's the same sentence that Chutkan gave Robert Palmer, a Florida man who also pleaded guilty to assaulting police at the Capitol. More than 200 other Capitol riot defendants have been sentenced so far. None have received a longer prison sentence than Ponder or Palmer. Chutkan said Ponder was "leading the charge" against police officers trying to hold off the mob that disrupted Congress from certifying President Biden's electoral victory. "This is not 'caught up,' Mr. Ponder," she said. "He was intent on attacking and injuring police officers. This was not a protest."
Prosecutors said Ponder swung a pole at a Capitol police officer on the Capitol's West Plaza, breaking it against the officer's shield. After retreating into the crowd, Ponder grabbed a sturdier pole and used it to assault two other officers, hitting one of them in the left shoulder, before police detained and handcuffed him. Ponder has been jailed since his arrest in March 2021. In April, he pleaded guilty to an assault charge punishable by a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. Federal sentencing guidelines called for a prison term ranging from nearly five years to just under six years, but Chutkan wasn't bound by those recommendations. Ponder has a substantial criminal record spanning three decades, including a 2008 conviction for bank robbery, according to prosecutors.
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