A 56-year-old prisoner who was sentenced to life as a teenager for the murder of a Texarkana police officer is not entitled to a new sentence, the Arkansas Supreme Court ruled Thursday.
The ruling cited an Arkansas law passed early last year barring no-parole life sentences for those who commit crimes as minors. John Lohbauer, who was convicted of first-degree murder in 1977, argued that his sentence was unconstitutional under a U.S. Supreme Court decision barring such. Arkansas' Fair Sentencing of Minors Act was passed last year in response to that decision.
Other prisoners serving life sentences for teenage crimes have continued to argue for re-sentencing hearings instead of parole, hoping for more leniency.
Under the law, Lohbauer is eligible for parole after 25 years, and he has already served that amount of time. He filed for executive clemency numerous times between 1988 and 2004, and each time, the governor denied his request.
Lohbauer killed Arkansas-side Police Lt. Ed Worrell and wounded Officer James "Butch" Clark in an ambush outside a discount store on Feb. 3, 1977. He was sentenced to life plus 40 years for the first-degree murder of Worrell, the assault on Clark and the burglary of Howard's Discount Store on North State Line Avenue, according to earlier Gazette reports.
After some trouble in school, a 15-year-old Lohbauer and two other teens, Darrell Edwards and Dan Vallejo, bought a used car with money stolen from Lohbauer's father's business account and left their homes in Illinois. They also took guns that belonged to their parents, according to earlier reports.
The teens planned to spend the night in Dallas and then go to Mexico, where Vallejo had relatives. But they stopped in Texarkana because the car had a radiator leak and was overheating.
"We had no intention of stopping in Texarkana or any intention of committing a crime there," Lohbauer wrote in a 2004 letter.
They got a hotel room on State Line and tried to buy a case of beer at a nearby store. The clerk would not sell them alcohol, but a customer purchased beer for them.
The trio then went to Howard's and tried to buy ammunition for their weapons, but were unsuccessful without identification. After they were back in the hotel and drinking beer, one of Lohbauer's friends decided they should break into Howard's store and steal ammunition and guns.
Lohbauer dropped his friends off in front of the store and waited in the car.
"Almost immediately, I started hearing sirens," he said in a 2004 interview. "I pulled back up to the front of the store and tried to honk the horn, but I forgot it was barely audible. The sirens were getting closer and closer, so I pulled up a side road to a bank parking lot. The police car pulled up and dropped two officers off in the front," he said.
Lohbauer said he does not remember making a conscious decision to shoot the officers. He just did it.
Ed Worrell was 28, married, and the father of two when he was killed. His third child was born after he died.
The two accomplices each received 20 years, but were paroled to other states in 1986.