Parole denied for man convicted of 1980 murder of jazz musician
By MARK MORRIS
The Kansas City Star
Officials denied parole Monday to a Clay County man convicted in the 1980 beating death of a jazz musician.
A federal jury convicted Raymond L. Bledsoe, 45, in 1983 of killing Stephen Harvey with a baseball bat near Liberty Memorial.
Bledsoe, who is white, earlier was acquitted by an all-white jury in Jackson County. Harvey, a saxophonist and emerging talent on the Kansas City jazz scene, was black. After Bledsoe’s acquittal, Alvin Sykes, a friend of Harvey’s, persuaded the U.S. Justice Department to charge Bledsoe in federal court with violating Harvey’s civil rights.
A federal jury convicted him of depriving Harvey of his right to enjoy a public facility because of his race after hearing that Bledsoe had confessed to his girlfriend that he had killed Harvey. A judge sentenced Bledsoe to life.
The parole commission decided that Bledsoe should continue serving his full sentence, said Tom Hutchison, chief of staff for the U.S. Parole Commission.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Prisons, Bledsoe will be eligible for release in May 2013. Under the old federal parole system, which was abandoned in favor of stricter sentencing guidelines in the mid-1980s, a life sentence was treated as 30 years. A 2013 release is not absolute, however.
“There will be a review at that point, and we could keep him in if we felt there was a threat to commit further crimes,” Hutchison said.
Hutchison said the commission will review Bledsoe’s case every two years and evaluate whether anything extraordinary had happened to justify earlier release. Bledsoe was denied parole in 1993, and it was decided then not to reconsider until 2008.
But according to federal court records, a 1999 parole commission review found that Bledsoe qualified for a parole hearing in 2007 because of his “superior program achievement” as an inmate.
Commissioners noted that he had worked in prison industries for 16 years “with excellent work reports,” had completed fork lift operation courses and finished three vocational training courses.
In 1997, however, a prison discipline hearing officer found that Bledsoe was “culpable” for a serious assault on another inmate.
http://www.kansascity.com/115/v-print/story/202002.html
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