BANGOR, Maine — An Alton man was sentenced Wednesday at the Penobscot Judicial Center to 21 months in prison for using checks given to him last year by a blind woman intended for her groceries to buy alcohol and a video game system for himself. The woman is now 77 years old.
District Court Judge Robert Murray sentenced Sidney Dunton, 31, to serve his state time concurrently with his federal sentence.
On Monday, Dunton was sentenced in U.S. District Court to 10 months in federal prison for violating the conditions of his supervised release.
He pleaded guilty in February to the state charge of Class C theft, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.
Dunton’s attorney, Joseph Belisle of Bangor, urged the judge to sentence his client to a concurrent sentence of 10 months so that he could be released to a federal halfway house. It was unclear Wednesday whether Dunton could be released to a federally run re-entry program from state prison.
Michael Roberts, deputy district attorney for Penobscot County, recommended the judge sentence Dunton to “something in the two-year range” on the theft charge.
In handing down the sentence, Murray said he took into account the fact that Dunton had repaid the more than $600 he stole from his elderly neighbor and admitted his guilt.
“The court cannot ignore this criminal history,” Murray said of Dunton’s many crime sprees.
It wasn’t until he took a course on criminal thinking earlier this year that Dunton realized he never had taken responsibility for his actions, the defendant told the judge. He also said he wanted to turn his life around.
“As of right now, I’m a liar and a thief,” he said. “I’m now trying to stay on the right path. I know the road I’ve been on is a very bad road.”
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 in Bangor. 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.
Although Dunton paid restitution on his most recent state charge, he still owes $1,200 in restitution on his federal charges, according to court documents.