Career robber John Edward Rockins received his ninth robbery conviction Tuesday as part of an arrangement with prosecutors that will keep the 54-year-old North Little Rock man behind bars he until he is 113 years old.
The 20-year prison term Rockins accepted from Pulaski County Circuit Judge Barry Sims marks the fifth time he has been sent to prison since 1995.
Rockins now has five convictions for aggravated robbery and four for simple robbery, with two more aggravated-robbery charges in Conway pending over allegations he held up the same convenience store -- and the same clerk -- twice over a six-day period. Another conviction would mean an automatic life sentence.
Tuesday's sentence was for the Feb. 29, 2016, armed robbery of a North Little Rock Shell station, part of what authorities said was a weeklong series of holdups in Faulkner and Pulaski counties.
Rockins received a 40-year sentence in November 2016 for the Feb. 28, 2016, holdup of the Flash Market in Sherwood.
Court filings show the former Jacksonville resident told authorities he committed his first robbery to pay for his cocaine habit, in November 1993.
That holdup at the Junior Food Mart in Jacksonville took place while Rockins was free on bond after an arrest in Little Rock for trying to cash a bogus $75 check in May 1993. He got three years on probation for the attempted forgery charge and was arrested in the robbery 10 days after sentencing.
His second holdup, while he was out on bond, was about three weeks before Christmas 1994, when he robbed a Shell Superstop in Jacksonville. He wasn't caught for another week, just after he had held up a North Little Rock Texaco. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison for the three robberies in July 1995.
He was on parole in 2001 when he was arrested for another three holdups, two in Conway and a third in Lonoke. That string came to an end in February 2001, shortly after he held up a Conway Exxon on U.S. 65 North
A Conway police officer who spotted the getaway car on Interstate 40 chased Rockins into North Little Rock where he surrendered after turning onto a dead-end street.
He got his second prison term -- a 20-year stretch -- for the Conway robberies about four months later. His third sentence, another 20-year sentence that ran concurrently, came in January 2002 for the Lonoke holdup.
Rockins told authorities that he'd turned again to robbery to fund his cocaine use, saying he'd started using drugs again because he was depressed about the February 2000 murder of his half brother, 33-year-old Joe Dan Hines Jr., in Little Rock.
Hines had been shot in the head by his girlfriend, Martha Ann Owen, during an argument about crack cocaine. A Pulaski County jury convicted her of second-degree murder in April 2001 and sentenced her to 20 years.
Rockins, paroled again in the fall of 2015, was linked to a weeklong robbery binge through Conway, North Little Rock and Sherwood that police said began on Feb. 27, 2016, with the stickup of a Conway Conoco on Skyline Drive and ended on March 7, 2016, with the armed robbery of an Exxon Mobil On The Run gas station, also on Skyline.
He was arrested 10 days later after the gas station manager picked him out of a photographic lineup as the robber.
Available records are not clear on when he was paroled. Court records show that Lonoke* County Circuit Judge Barbara Elmore objected.
"This person is dangerous," she wrote to the Post Prison Transfer Board in April 2015. "Do not let him out."
A Faulkner County jury found him guilty of aggravated robbery in January 2017 for the Exxon station robbery, the only time Rockins has ever stood trial. He did not testify, and jurors gave him 60 years in prison.
Metro on 05/31/2018
*CORRECTION: Barbara Elmore is the Lonoke County circuit judge who urged parole officials not to release serial robber John Edward Rockins, 54, of North Little Rock. Elmore’s jurisdiction was incorrectly identified in a previous version of this story.