A 40-year-old blight on society from Van Buren will be spending some time in the company of the Arkansas Department of Corrections after a plea bargain this week in Sebastian County Circuit Court on drug paraphernalia charges.
Steven Don King of Van Buren heads off to the penitentiary safe in the knowledge that he'll be back in the area pretty soon, since he has two felony cases pending in Crawford County as well.
One of those is for failure to register as a sex offender.
On Wednesday, the ever active King scored six years on paraphernalia charges with an additional six years suspended as well as a +4 habitual offender tag. There was also a one year county- jail sentence tied into the mess some kind of way.
The question here is not why he is going back to prison. The question is why he is out of prison in the first place?
King has been knocking out defiant felonies at an alarming rate since as far back as 2008 on his first conviction for failing to register for the previous crime that got him on the registry in the first place, Arkansas Court Connect only goes back to 2008 with his listings, but a national data base shows he committed Sexual Assault in the Fourth Degree sometime prior to his 2008 arrest.
King was given ten years with six suspended for that faux pas, but the fun was just getting started.
But August of 2010 he was picking up traffic tickets in Crawford County and added a 180 days sentence for a DWI in early 2020. After a series of interactions for contempt, failure to pay fines and having his license revoked, King got his second failure to register charge after moving to Fort Smith.
That resulted in another five year sentence, but about two years later he got busted in the midst of two other defendants and was pinched for violation of a protection order and various drug infractions which triggered a revocation of parole and added another 48 month sentence to his rap sheet.
In February of 2018 he was once again sentenced to another ten years for Theft of Property and another revocation but not before he was allowed to plea on a Forgery charge in Sebastian County with another 60-month stretch as his prize.
Christmas week of 2020 there was an arrest for Possession of Drug Paraphernalia and another Theft of Property and a few weeks later he added another paraphernalia charge. But before we could get to court on the other two charges, King failed to register as a sex offender again in March of this year.
That earned him a six year sentence after Sebastian County had filed Theft of Property charges on King in February and his court date on Wednesday was to answer for his previously unpunished transgressions. That was coupled with contempt and failure to appear violations, which were dropped on Wednesday.
