Ernest Bundy is a convicted armed robber.
He held up Baltimore County stores four times and has served about seven of the 30 years in prison to which he was sentenced in 1999.
Bundy?s also an admitted drug addict who started using when he was 17.
He walked into a Baltimore County courtroom Wednesday morning where his sisters, cousins and grandparents were waiting and asked Judge John Turnbull to re-sentence him, to send him to a drug rehabilitation program.
Turnbull said no.
This courtroom scene and a dilemma of judgment plays out in various forms routinely ? someone comes forward and says they?ve changed, or they need help. In Bundy?s case, his family is behind him and they believe he?s better and desperately want him home.
Letters come in from prison inmates all the time telling the judge how they?ve changed, said James Gentry, who represented the state Wednesday. But a prison sentence is not only about rehabilitation, he said, but also about “punishment, pure and simple.”
“My frustration is, what about the victim?” Gentry said. “Before you open up the cell door, you have to think to yourself, ?Wait a minute, let?s not forget what he did in 1999.?”
What he did, according to his guilty plea, was walk into stores and rob clerks at gunpoint, using a pellet gun.
When Bundy went to prison, his sister Angela Hoffler said she didn?t have much empathy for his drug addiction.
“If you?re there, you?re there for a reason,” she said Wednesday.
Bundy grew closer to their father since he?s been in prison, she said, which helped her brother take responsibility for his crimes, decide to come off drugs and work to be closer with his children.
Hoffler said she took a job at a drug treatment program a few years ago, which helped her see addiction as a disease.
“I honestly believe there are some people who can?t get better,” she said. But she said Bundy, who has a GED and spent time in the Navy before he became addicted to cocaine and heroin, is different.
“Laughter,” she said, is what her family?s missing because Bundy is in prison.
If anyone could just walk into court after serving a fraction of their sentence and have it cut short, defense attorney Gerald Ruter said, a prison sentence of any length “would mean nothing.”
“But I can assure you that those sentences are not cut back routinely,” he said. “I would like to think that if Ernest had had an opportunity to get back into the community. … He?d be the kind of guy that one might want to take a chance on.”
