A man who attacked police officers with poles during the riot at the U.S. 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, D.C., said he “got caught up” in the chaos that erupted on Jan. 6, 2021, and “didn’t mean for any of this to happen.”
“I wasn’t thinking that day,” Ponder told U.S. 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 received a longer prison sentence than Ponder or Palmer.