BANGOR, Maine — Sidney A. Dunton doesn’t do drugs. He doesn’t drink alcohol and he hasn’t been diagnosed with a mental illness.
Despite that, he already has spent a third of his life behind bars.
Dunton, 31, of Alton is headed back to federal prison for 10 months. When he returns to Maine, he most likely will spend more time in a state prison.
In U.S. District Court on Monday, Dunton was sentenced to prison by Judge George Z. Singal after pleading guilty to violating the conditions of his supervised release last year. Dunton is expected to be in state court before the end of the week to resolve a $600 theft case in which he is expected to plead guilty. A year ago, he allegedly used a check an elderly blind woman gave him for her groceries to purchase a video game system.
Michael Roberts, deputy district attorney for Penobscot County, said Monday he would urge a state judge to sentence Dunton to at least twice as much state time as his coming federal sentence.
Dunton has paid full restitution in the theft case, according to his attorney, Terence Harrigan of Bangor.
In imposing the sentence Monday, Singal observed that Dunton does not have the addiction or mental health problems from which most defendants suffer. Dunton also does not have juvenile record.
“It’s as if you became an adult and fell off a cliff,” Singal said, referring to the criminal record Dunton has amassed since he turned 19.
The federal judge warned Dunton that he “is walking on the edge of a razor” and in danger of becoming a career criminal.
Dunton’s stints in prison began a decade ago when he was sentenced to 60 days in federal prison for mail fraud and making false entries in the records of a financial institution in 1998. Since then, he has continued to pile up charges.
He was on bail and under house arrest in September 2001 when he joined friends for a series of car burglaries and thefts over a three-week period. The trio took compact discs, CD players, radar detectors and tools from vehicles in an extensive operation that spanned Bangor, Hampden, Brewer, Old Town, Orono, Veazie and the University of Maine, according to court documents.
He was sentenced to 3½ years at the Charleston Correctional Facility for that crime spree in addition to his sentence on charges of aggravated assault, theft and violation of bail conditions stemming from an incident in January 2000 when he rammed his car into a Penobscot County Sheriff’s Department cruiser and pointed a fake gun at a deputy. Dunton was shot several times by the deputy and was seriously injured. The Attorney General’s Office determined the shooting was justified.
Dunton was a prisoner at the Charleston facility when on Aug. 22, 2003, he quietly walked away from a stage area where he was supposed to be setting up a speaker at the National Folk Festival on the Bangor Waterfront. He was arrested 10 days later at a rest stop on Interstate 95 in Rhode Island.
Law enforcement officials found Dunton sleeping in the Mercedes-Benz he had stolen from a home in Spring Lake, N.J. Police located him using the satellite tracking system on the car. He was sentenced to an additional 38 months in state prison for the escape and was released in July 2009, a month before he allegedly stole $600 from the blind woman.
Dunton was on bail for the recent theft charge when he left Maine earlier this year to work in Minnesota without the permission of his federal probation officer. He was arrested in May and returned to Maine. He has been held without bail since then.
If he pleads guilty to the theft charge as expected, Dunton faces a maximum of five years in state prison and a fine of up to $5,000.
It will be up to the state judge whether Dunton’s state sentence will be served at the same time or after he has been released from federal prison.