Peter Stager, a truck driver who assaulted a police officer at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, was sentenced to 52 months in federal prison.
Stager was part of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 in protest of the results of the 2020 election. He was captured on video beating police officer Blake Miller with a flagpole and was one of nine men charged with assaulting Miller and two of his colleagues.
After assaulting Miller, prosecutors said that Stager was captured on video, pointing to the Capitol and yelling: “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.”
In a court filing, Stager’s lawyers told the judge that their client had experienced a traumatic childhood; his mother abandoned him and his siblings when he was 6 years old, and Stager found himself homeless and impoverished at a very young age.
Lawyers argued that Stager had no intention of attending the insurrection on January 6, but that he had finished delivering a load near the Capitol and did not want to pay for fuel. He decided to attend Donald Trump’s rally on the Ellipse in Washington that morning and was triggered by the violence that ensued.
Three of Stagers’ co-defendants have been sentenced on assault charges, each given a prison term of between three and five years. Trials for other January 6 rioters are still ongoing.
