Benjamin Martin (U.S. Attorney’s Office).
A California man who confronted cops at a set of doors to the U.S. Capitol building and got sprayed by mace on Jan. 6 was sentenced for possession of an illegal weapons cache that included an AR‑15‑style rifle and 500 rounds of ammunition.
Benjamin Martin, 46, was sentenced on Monday to three years and two months in prison for illegally possessing several firearms and ammunition, U.S. Attorney Phillip A. Talbert announced in a press release. Martin was convicted of the firearms charges following a one-day trial.
The weapons case came to light in September 2021 when the FBI executed a search warrant at his residence in Madera in connection with the Jan. 6 breach.
During the search, agents seized eight firearms, including an AR‑15‑style rifle, multiple high-capacity magazines for the AR-15, and more than 500 rounds of ammunition, which he had been prohibited from possessing because of a prior domestic violence conviction, authorities said. He had choked his then-girlfriend and dragged her back into the house after she tried to flee, officials said.
Shortly after his arrest, Martin was caught on a recorded jail call where he instructed his current fiancee to lie to authorities and tell them that the firearms seized from his residence belonged to her and her father and that he did not know about them. Martin received an enhancement to his sentence for witness tampering, officials said.
In June, Martin was convicted for his role in the Capitol riot. He attended Donald Trump‘s “Stop the Steal” rally before walking to the Capitol building, where he saw a large crowd covering a set of stairs, with some people scaling the walls of the building.
“You guys are not doing your job,” Martin said to officers guarding a set of doors to the building. “You swore an oath. You’re bound by your word. Move out of the way and let us in.”
When the officers did not respond, Martin shouted, “our house,” into an officer’s face.
At one point, one of the doors was opened from the inside as a rioter exited the building. Martin reached past the officers in front of the door, grabbed the door, and entered the building as other rioters flooded in behind him, authorities said.
Inside, a larger group of officers pushed Martin and other rioters back out the door but stayed in the doorway. Martin held the door open as other rioters began to tackle, shove, spray, and hurl objects at the officers, prosecutors said. The officers tried to retreat into the building and shut the door behind them, but Martin continued to open it. One officer tried to get Martin’s hand off the door, striking it with a baton, but Martin did not stop.
The officer continued to swing his baton at Martin’s hand, but Martin managed to grab the door as another rioter sprayed the officer with mace. The officer grabbed the door and tried to close it, but Martin again grabbed it and tried to keep it open. A group of officers ultimately shut the door again and locked it. Minutes later, Martin pulled one of the doors back open.
Martin stayed in the area for over an hour as rioters tried to get back into the building despite an onslaught of police mace and pepper bullets being fired into the crowd.
“We are going to rise up against an oppressive government,” Martin said, telling the officers to “walk away” from their posts before he eventually left the area.
Court documents reveal that Martin later told a news outlet he was trying to de-escalate the situation.
“There were people trying to break into the building and I was trying to calm everyone down and to get it to be a little bit peaceful and say, ‘Hey, guys, you know, we can be here and we don’t need to act out,’” Martin said. “There were some inciters who were throwing like — Trumpers don’t throw rocks at buildings. Trumpers don’t try to break windows or break doors.”
He said “other groups” were breaking in, and he tried to put himself between the mob and the police.
“I was trying to negotiate with both sides to de-escalate the issue,” Martin said. “I was literally in the middle of the front door when the herd behind me — there were thousands of them. All this weight of people starts moving you in a direction, I couldn’t control the direction of anything at that point.”
He was arrested after someone who had known him since high school tipped off the FBI that he was there after seeing him get pepper sprayed in news footage and sent agents a screenshot of him circled from a clip on ABC “World News Tonight.” The tipster had been friends with him on Facebook but had unfriended him after his views became increasingly political.
Martin faces additional imprisonment and fines when he is scheduled to be sentenced in the Capitol breach case on Dec. 20.
