By Richard K. De Atley
The Press Enterprise
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — A man whom an appellate court said wasted “a gift” of parole from a second-degree murder sentence after a judge advocated on his behalf was sentenced Friday to nearly 11 years in prison for his role in two armed robberies.
Carl Franklin Ellison, 50, has his adult life book-ended by his participation in two nights of crime years apart: the Nov. 1, 2008, robberies, one in Riverside and the other in Moreno Valley, and his role as an 18-year-old in the Jan. 5, 1981, robbery, kidnap and murder of Riverside convenience store clerk Dickie Gibson.
Friday was the second sentencing for Ellison in the 2008 robberies.
The 4th District Court of Appeal reversed trial judge Harold F. Bradford’s original term of six years for the robberies, saying Bradford abused his discretion by removing from sentencing consideration the three strikes from the 1981 slaying.
“We note that the three strikes law is aimed at recidivists who have committed serious offenses,” the court wrote in its ruling. “None are more serious than murder, robbery and kidnapping.”
Prosecutors said Ellison’s sentence Friday should have been a three-strikes term of 77 years to life.
Bradford this time removed the strikes for kidnapping and robbery, but maintained the murder strike for a 10-year, 8-month sentence. Ellison has about three years and four months credit for time already served, Bradford estimated.
Ellison claimed he was fooled into participating in both crimes - that he was roped into the 1981 kidnap-murder by his uncle, Richard Boyd, whom he said he believed he was just driving home. And he claimed he was initially fooled into acting as a getaway driver in 2008 because he had stayed in the car and did not know his codefendant had just robbed a motel and then an auto parts store.
Prosecutors argued his role was far more sinister.
They disputed his account that he did not plan with his uncle the robbery, murder and kidnap of Gibson, and suggested he may have supplied the gun used in the crime. They noted that he violated parole seven times and did stints in prison for those violations following his 1994 release after serving 12 years for the Gibson murder.
For the 2008 robberies, they said that once Ellison realized police were chasing him and his co-defendant, he fled at speeds up to 90 miles an hour and eventually crashed the car.
Ellison’s parole from state prison followed a letter on Ellison’s behalf by now-retired Riverside County Superior Court Judge Edward Webster. He was the prosecutor in the Gibson murder case, and believed then that Ellison was unduly influenced by his uncle. It was the only such letter Webster wrote in his career.
“Judge Webster admitted he had been wrong when he wrote the letter to the parole board that the defendant would not commit another crime,” the appellate court opinion noted. It also said Ellison “was given a gift by Judge Webster and the parole board…Rather than take this gift and cherish it…he violated parole no less than seven times…he aided and abetted two armed robberies in this case.”
Webster, now an assigned judge, said recently he could not comment on an active case. Friday’s sentencing of Ellison can be appealed.
In a hearing earlier this month, Deputy District Attorney Eugene Carson argued for Bradford to consider all three strikes for sentencing this time.
Boyd, originally sentenced to death for the Gibson murder but now serving life in prison for it, had been called to testify about his nephew’s role in the 1981 slaying, but then declined.
Ellison took the witness stand on his own behalf.
“I never touched Mr. Gibson,” he said of the 1981 slaying of the kidnapped clerk in an orange grove. “I had no part in that whatsoever.”
“For us to believe you, we have to trust you. And you are a convicted robber three times over and a convicted murderer who violated parole seven times,” Carson told Ellison.
“He is the poster child for the three-strikes law,” Carson argued to Bradford.
Defense attorney David Wohl argued that in the 1981 slaying case, Ellison “was threatened, based on his testimony…He was threatened by Boyd that he better not talk. He was advised by Boyd that he was equally responsible, no matter what he did that night. It’s clear…that he was a relatively minor offender.”
In the end, Bradford agreed with Wohl, telling Ellison Friday that he believed his new sentence was “clearly within the spirit and intent of the three strikes law…You have twice been caught up in events that spun out of your control.”
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