A truck driver who assaulted a police officer with a flagpole on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced on Monday to 52 months in federal jail.

The assault by the motive force, Peter Stager, produced one of the disturbing photos to emerge from the Capitol assault. Mr. Stager, 44, of Conway, Ark., was captured on video beating the officer, Blake Miller, with the flagpole in a match of rage as Officer Miller lay facedown in a mob of different rioters with “no means of defending himself,” prosecutors wrote in court docket papers.

Mr. Stager was certainly one of 9 males charged with assaulting Officer Miller and two of his colleagues, Officers Carter Moore and Andrew Wayte, in a 90-second spree of violence that unfolded on the steps outdoors a tunnel on the Lower West Terrace of the Capitol. Officers who fell sufferer to assaults in a tunnel on the terrace and on the steps there have repeatedly likened the violence to the hand-to-hand fight of a medieval battle.

After assaulting Officer Miller, prosecutors say, Mr. Stager was caught on video pointing on the Capitol, and declaring: “Everybody in there is a disgrace. That entire building is filled with treasonous traitors. Death is the only remedy for what’s in that building.”

He went on to say: “Every single one of those Capitol law enforcement officers, death is the remedy. That is the only remedy they get.”

In court docket papers filed earlier than the sentencing in Federal District Court in Washington, Mr. Stager’s legal professionals advised Judge Rudolph Contreras that their consumer had, like many Jan. 6 defendants, skilled a traumatic childhood. During his early years, the legal professionals wrote, Mr. Stager was homeless, sleeping beneath benches in California and stealing meals from shops and dumpsters.

After Mr. Stager’s mom deserted him and his siblings, when he was across the age of 6, he ended up in foster care, the legal professionals mentioned.

The legal professionals advised Judge Contreras that Mr. Stager was in Washington on Jan. 6 solely due to a scheduling battle with the dispatch service of his trucking firm. After delivering a load of produce to a vacation spot close to Washington, the legal professionals wrote, he selected to not drive again to Arkansas with an empty truck, realizing he wouldn’t make any cash and must pay for gasoline.

Instead, the legal professionals mentioned, Mr. Stager “decided to make the most of the situation” and attend President Donald J. Trump’s rally on the Ellipse in Washington on the morning of Jan. 6.

“This decision is one that Mr. Stager will regret for the rest of his life,” the legal professionals wrote.

As the gang moved from Mr. Trump’s speech close to the White House to the Capitol and grew more and more violent, “Mr. Stager’s emotional state was in turmoil,” his legal professionals wrote. Ultimately, “seeing red,” they mentioned, he picked up a flagpole mendacity on the bottom and went after Officer Miller.

Mr. Stager apologized to the officer in a letter submitted together with his lawyer’s submitting, saying that he didn’t “have hatred toward law enforcement, let alone for anyone.”

Three of Mr. Stager’s co-defendants — Justin Jersey, Logan Barnhart and Mason Courson — have additionally been sentenced on assault expenses. Each of them was given a jail time period of between three and 5 years, a comparatively modest penalty for circumstances involving assaults on the police.

Other rioters sentenced for assaulting officers have obtained among the stiffest penalties of any of the greater than 1,000 individuals charged in reference to the Capitol assault.

A Pennsylvania welder who attacked officers with a chair after which with chemical spray was sentenced in May to more than 14 years in prison. The subsequent month, a California man was given more than 12 years in prison for twice driving a Taser into the neck of Officer Michael Fanone.