Given Life Term at 22 for Armed Robbery, Man, Now 40, Hoped for 27-to-40 at Resentencing Today
Life means life in Florida, and John Curtis Ivey, sentenced to a life term at age 22 for an armed robbery in which he pistol-whipped the victim, has served 19 years so far.
He knows he deserves punishment for his crime. But since no one was killed or permanently injured, he hopes he can some day be released from prison, reports the St. Petersburg Times in a lengthy article about his case.
Engaged to the woman he was dating when he committed the 1991 crime, Ivey won a resentencing in an appeal of his Hillsborough County case—and got life a second time, thanks to the lengthy felony record he had racked up as a young man. But then, as they were looking through his case file one day, the two noticed a discrepancy between the sentencing form provided to his lawyer 19 years ago and the one the judge had seen.
That got Ivey a second resentencing hearing, scheduled to be held today. His lawyer, Bryant Camareno, is asking the court to sentence his client to the recommended range on the form given to his defense attorney in 1992, a prison term of 27 to 40 years. The judge at that sentencing saw a form that recommended a life term for Ivey.
At the hearing today, Circuit Judge Susan Sexton sentenced Ivey to 27 years after other errors–including a misclassification of the armed robbery he committed as a more serious crime than it was—led to a deal with prosecutors, another St. Petersburg Times article reports.
Ivey should have gotten a maximum prison term of 15 years, the newspaper says, but agreed not to file any appeals. He is expected to be released next week and will then be on probation for another 15 years. Meanwhile, he has earned a bachelor’s degree in theology while serving his time.
He apologized to the judge for his crimes, then smiled and shook his attorney’s hand when it was all over.
“I’m very hopeful that you are going to make it OK on probation,” the judge told him during the sentencing hearing. “Because I think you have done a lot in prison, which I don’t see very often.”
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