A Heber Springs man convicted on six counts of production of child pornography after a jury trial last August asked for -- and was granted -- mercy by a federal judge not often given toward leniency in sentencing.
Norman Thurber, 59, was sentenced to 20 years in prison on each of the six counts, which U.S. District Judge Brian Miller ordered to run concurrently over the objection of Assistant U.S. Attorney Kristin Bryant, who had argued for either a presumptive life sentence of 30 years in prison on each count to run consecutively for a total of 180 years or at minimum, concurrently for a total of 30 years in prison.
Thurber's attorney, Latrece Gray with the Federal Public Defenders Office in Little Rock, raised objections to offense conduct listed in a presentence report that she said was unsubstantiated from the trial record. Gray, citing Thurber's age and poor health, asked Miller to sentence him to concurrent 15 year sentences on the argument that he would be in his early 70s upon release and not likely to reoffend.
Thurber was charged with six counts of production of child pornography, accused of producing photos and videos of a 15-year-old girl who had run away from her home in Corpus Christi, Texas, after he drove there and took her back to Heber Springs.
Thurber was arrested by Heber Springs police on June 28, 2020, after the girl -- referred to in court only by the initials "A.H." -- told police in the north Central Arkansas town that she had been brought there by a man named "Norman" who had picked her up two days earlier near her Corpus Christi home. She told police she had met "Norman" a week earlier on an online dating app.
Over the course of a two-day trial held last August, jurors heard from two witnesses; Heber Springs police detective Daniel Malone and FBI agent Daniel Turner, both of whom testified about their involvement in the investigation. Thurber's trial attorneys, Cara Boyd Connors and Tamera Deaver, tried to discredit the government's case by suggesting Thurber had no way of knowing the girl was underage, and they attempted to cast doubt on the government's claims that she was an unwilling participant.
After the testimony, jurors deliberated for five hours before returning guilty verdicts on all six counts.
Gray was appointed to take over Thurber's representation after Connors was elected to a circuit judge position and Deaver left the Federal Public Defenders Office.
On Wednesday, Miller first took up a matter of Thurber's pre-sentence report, to which Gray raised a number of objections based on information she said had not been substantiated during the trial.
Miller spent about a half hour on objections to the pre-sentence report before overruling Gray's objections. Bryant called Malone to the stand to substantiate conduct contained in the report that had not been introduced at the trial, such as contents of text messages exchanged between Thurber and the minor girl, and the location of a pistol that was discovered under a mattress in Thurber's bedroom.
Malone described a number of text exchanges between Thurber and A.H. that alluded to sexual acts involving bondage and discipline as well as sado-masochistic behavior, corroborating information in the report.
Following Malone's testimony, Gray argued for a 15-year sentence, noting that due to Thurber's age and poor physical condition, even a minimum sentence could be tantamount to a life sentence for him. She said nothing in Thurber's background suggested he was attracted to children and said the government had failed to prove that he knew A.H. was underage. She said no searches for child pornography showed up on his computer or phone.
Before Miller announced the sentence, Thurber spoke for several minutes, saying that he had remarried after his first wife died of cancer but that his marriage had fallen apart soon after.
"I never expected to be in this position," he said.
Thurber said during his time in jail awaiting trial, his health had deteriorated due to a blood disease and he had been forced to sue the jail where he was held in order to get treatments for it.
From the bench, Miller expressed his misgivings about his sentencing options.
"If I give him anything less than 3o years on each count, I'm varying downward," he said. "I'm not convinced this is a life in prison case."
Miller said the role of adults is to protect children, not to take advantage of them, and he said the conduct portrayed on six videos played at trial as "reprehensible."
Even so, Miller said, to him the case did not rise to the level of a life sentence.
"The sentence I'm about to give you, I can't sit here and tell you that I love it," Miller said. "It looks like I'm going soft on crime and that hurts my feelings. ... I don't want to be known as being soft on crime but I think a 20-year sentence is the appropriate sentence."
In addition to 20 years in prison, Miller ordered Thurber to serve 10 years on supervised release after he leaves prison.