A Jacksonville man who called the riot at the U.S. Capitol his “rowdiest” experience was sentenced to federal prison Friday after expressing shame for struggling with a female police officer.
“I am devastated that I am guilty of assaulting a female officer, but these are my actions,” Daniel Paul Gray, 43, wrote in a letter to U.S. District Court Senior Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who ordered Gray to spend 30 months behind bars.
Sentencing guidelines suggested a term of 41 to 51 months, and a prosecutor asked for the full time, saying Gray’s conduct during the Jan. 6, 2021, riot “embodies a total disrespect for the law.”
Gray pleaded guilty in October to obstructing an official proceeding and assaulting, resisting or impeding government officers — the police who tried to keep supporters of then-President Donald Trump from overrunning the Capitol.
The female officer he acknowledged struggling with fell down a set of stairs and was treated later for a pinched nerve, although Gray’s public defender included police body-camera images in a sentencing memo to argue that Gray had stepped away from her and “another individual was likely the cause of the fall.”