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Re-sentencing in officer's shooting brings justice

Upon further review, Larry Robbins will spend the rest of his life behind bars as payment for the two bullets that he put into a Citrus County law officer.

A year ago, Robbins dodged a legal bullet himself when a judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison for shooting David DeCarlo as the Sheriff's Office investigator served a search warrant at Robbins' Citrus Springs home in May 2003.

Showing true grit, DeCarlo not only has recovered from the near-fatal wounds to his shoulder and abdomen but he is back on the force. His duties now include protecting children from sexual predators.

But the sentence that the 27-year-old Robbins received from a visiting jurist, Circuit Judge S. Joseph Davis Jr., did not seem sufficient for the crime of trying to kill a police officer.

After all, in this courthouse, stealing a six-pack of beer can get you 10 years in prison. Trying to kill a cop has to carry a lot more weight than that.

The prosecutors asked for a second opinion, this one from an appellate panel. Late last week, the 5th District Court of Appeal announced that Robbins deserved a life term after all, and directed Davis to re-sentence him.

With a 20-year prison sentence for a drug conviction that already had been tacked onto the original 30 years, Robbins was looking at being locked up for the next 50 years. Now, he will spend the rest of his life in prison.

Part of the appellate panel's justification stemmed from Robbins' past, a life of crime that moved a prosecutor to comment in court that "Clearly, this is a defendant who has no regard for laws or organized society."

The book is not yet closed on Robbins in Citrus County, however. He is one of four men who have claimed in a federal lawsuit that, as inmates at the county jail in 2004, they were victimized by corrections officers who tainted their food and drinks with human waste. That suit, filed in March, remains unresolved.

For Detective DeCarlo, his family, colleagues on the force and the community at large, however, this one painful chapter has now reached a much more satisfying conclusion.

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[Last modified June 28, 2006, 07:44:42]