A Massachusetts doctor who punched a police officer during the January 6 Capitol riot has permanently lost her right to practice medicine in the state. The Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine revoked Dr. Jacquelyn Starer’s right to renew her medical license on July 16, more than a year after the license had already expired. The board said it found that Starer, 72, of Ashland, was among the crowd that stormed and breached the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and that she struck a Metropolitan Police officer with her closed fist.
Starer was a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist with a subspecialty in addiction medicine, first licensed to practice in Massachusetts back in 1983. She worked at Brigham and Women’s Faulkner Hospital at the time of her arrest in December 2022, and the hospital later confirmed she was no longer active there. According to court documents and video from inside the Capitol rotunda that day, Starer wore a red Trump pom pom hat as she pushed forward with the crowd. She squared up with an officer, clenched her teeth, raised her fist and struck him, then shouted a profane insult. Prosecutors said her assault riled up the already hostile crowd and contributed to the danger of the situation, and that she yelled expletives at officers while pushing her way through the mob to confront them.
Starer’s own account of what happened differs on the details but not on the outcome. Her attorneys said she was in a heated exchange with another rioter who she felt was invading her space, that she turned away from the police line, and that an officer pushed her in the back, at which point she turned and struck him instinctively. Whatever the sequence, she pleaded guilty in 2024 to two felony counts, civil disorder and assaulting, resisting or impeding officers, along with several misdemeanor charges. A federal judge sentenced her to nine months of home confinement. At sentencing, Starer told the judge she wasn’t proud of her actions that day, calling her assault on the officer a “regrettable encounter,” and said she accepted full responsibility and wished reason had prevailed over her emotions.
None of that kept her out of the sweeping pardons Trump issued for January 6 defendants shortly after returning to office, a group that included people convicted of violent offenses against police officers, not just the nonviolent trespassers the pardons are sometimes described as covering. Starer’s federal case disappeared. What the pardon could not touch was her standing with the state of Massachusetts, which operates independently of federal criminal proceedings. Starer had already entered into a voluntary agreement not to practice following her 2022 arrest, and this month the state board made that arrangement permanent, closing the door on her ever renewing a license in Massachusetts again.
The distinction matters beyond this one case. A presidential pardon can erase a federal conviction and end a federal sentence, but it has no authority over a state licensing board’s judgment about who is fit to hold a medical license. Starer’s case is a clear example of that limit in practice. She avoided prison. She did not avoid the consequence that actually determines whether she can go back to seeing patients.
Her case is not an isolated one either. She was arrested after a tipster recognized her from open source photos and video and contacted the FBI, and prosecutors say she entered the Capitol roughly ten minutes after the mob first breached the building, well into the chaos rather than at its edges. More than 964 people were arrested in connection with the January 6 attack overall, and cases like Starer’s, professionals with real standing in their communities who were later swept up in the pardons, continue to surface years later as state boards and licensing bodies work through what accountability looks like when the federal system has already closed the book.
