Van Buren felon given ten years to serve concurrently with the ten years he was already serving
The Sebastian County Prosecutors Office added another notch in their "win" column last week when they brought a convict 260 miles from the East Arkansas Unit of the Arkansas Department of Corrections to enter a plea deal on crimes he should have never been out to commit in the first place.
Sixty-year-old Robert Thorpe of Van Buren of Van Buren was given a total of 36 years of concurrent sentences with another 40 years of suspended sentences Wednesday on Possession of Controlled Substance, Fleeing and two possession of Drug Paraphernalia charges.
Since the longest individual sentence in the bundle was for ten years, Thorpe will be sent back to Brickeys and the East Arkansas Unit to serve ten years to run concurrent with the ten years he was sent back to serve for violating his parole in the first place.
Stay with me here.
On May 3, 2017 Thorpe was sentenced to 120 months on a negotiated plea deal for Felony Robbery and Theft of Property in Crawford County. He was also handed 224 months of suspended sentences at that time.
Fast forward to September 29, 2019 when Thorpe was arrested for Theft of Property > $25,000 that resulted in yet another suspended sentence in January of this year. He was arrested in November 2020 an April of this year for the various crimes for which he was sentenced last week,
So to recap - Sebastian County officials shuffled an inmate 260 miles who was already serving ten years to negotiate a plea deal for a ten year sentence to run concurrently with the ten year sentence he received on a plea deal for which he served less than two years in the first place.
And he was sitting on 496 months of suspended sentences for crimes dating back to 2015 out of Crawford County before they tagged on some more useless numbers last week.
But hey....97% conviction rate.
