A 38-year-old North Little Rock man who has been behind bars since he was 15 for killing a teenage mother of two while trying to rob her mother had his life sentence reduced to a 30-year term on Friday.
The reduction makes Randy Damon Wilkins eligible to apply for parole.
He is one of 55 Arkansas capital-murder convicts whose sentences were overturned by a 2010 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that bars automatic life sentences for kids who kill. In 2012, the high court made its earlier decision retroactive and ordered new sentences for the affected defendants.
The Supreme Court ruling does not affect the defendants' convictions, and they still can receive life sentences at their resentencing hearings.
Wilkins is the first of 18 defendants convicted of capital murder in Pulaski County to benefit from the decision.
The high court found that the practice of locking teenagers up for life without giving them a chance at early release violated the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
The court ruled that automatic life sentences, which the court compared to the death penalty, does not take into consideration that children are different from adults.
Citing scientific advances in the understanding of the human mind, the court found that teenagers' brains are more impressionable than their adult counterparts. That factor makes them more immature and impetuous, but also gives them a greater capacity at reform than adults, the high court stated.
Wilkins' attorney Tom Devine and chief deputy prosecutor John Johnson negotiated the 30-year sentence. Johnson originally prosecuted Wilkins and his co-defendants.
Wilkins was the youngest of three teens accused of killing 19-year-old Detra Bolden while trying to rob her drug-dealer mother, Joyce "Big Mama" Mance, of marijuana in January 1994.
He was also the only one to stand trial. Jurors deliberated about three hours at his March 1995 trial to find him guilty of capital murder.
Life in prison was the only sentence available because prosecutors had waived the death penalty. Jurors could have convicted him of the lesser charges of first-degree murder or second-degree murder.
The other two teens, Timothy Laplez Davis, then 19, and Milton Terrance Anderson, then 17, took plea deals. Anderson testified against Wilkins in exchange for a 25-year prison sentence for first-degree murder. Davis pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in exchange for a 30-year sentence.
According to testimony, the three teens were spending the night at a friend's house where they were overheard talking about robbing someone. They left together, and Wilkins returned first, an hour later.
Witnesses testified that he said he had shot Bolden, a mother of two, and that when Davis and Anderson returned to the friend's house, they also said Wilkins had shot her.
Wilkins told jurors that he did not shoot anyone and that he hadn't gone with the other two teens to Mance's home.
He admitted that he'd planned to rob someone, but told jurors he'd refused to go along with a plan to rob Mance.
He also testified that he'd never told anyone he had shot Bolden. He said he'd caught a ride with another friend before returning to the house.
Anderson told jurors that Wilkins came up with the idea of robbing Mance. Anderson said they went to the woman's home, where Anderson went inside and asked to buy marijuana. He said Mance told him to come back later.
Anderson testified that he went back outside and told Davis and Wilkins that there was a lot of "weed" in the house.
He said that Bolden leaned outside the door of the house, and Wilkins pulled out a gun and shot at her, although he didn't see whether she was struck.
He and Davis ran away, eventually returning to the friend's home after Wilkins had already returned, he said.
North Little Rock police arrested the three teenagers three days after the woman was killed, because Anderson's father had gone to Mance's home to apologize for the killing.
Mance told police she was able to recognize Anderson from a photograph the boy's father showed her. Investigators said they had no leads before the man approached Mance.
Two months after Wilkins' conviction, Mance pleaded guilty in May 1995 to drug-trafficking charges stemming from a November 1993 raid at her West 16th Street home where police found 2.3 ounces of marijuana and 4.8 grams of cocaine, court records show.
She was sentenced to probation, but two years later, she was sentenced to four years in prison after she was arrested in a December 1996 raid at a Schaer Street house. The raid turned up 3.75 ounces of marijuana, plus money police had used earlier to buy drugs, court records show.
Davis, the oldest of the three Bolden case defendants, pleaded guilty to capital murder and accepted a life sentence in November 2009 in Hot Spring County for killing 21-year-old Damien Jones in Malvern in May 2008, court records show.
Jones was shot multiple times in his Baker Street home, and police said Davis had been one of four armed people, one of them a woman, who had been at Jones' home looking for him.
They confronted Jones' mother and girlfriend at the residence, and when Jones arrived shortly thereafter, the four opened fire as they chased him through the house. They fled in a Jeep Cherokee, leaving the wounded man bleeding on the floor.
Davis and the woman, Shkendra Braxton of Augusta, were arrested together in Maumelle after someone reported them to the police. Braxton, then 23, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in January 2010 in exchange for a 25-year sentence.
A Section on 08/27/2016