Court hands down 15 2/3-year sentence to inmate or 2015 slaying of fellow prisoner at USP Hazelton

Family members gave Crawford’s killer — who to this day insists it was self-defense and who strongly implied Monday that he would have been acquitted by a jury of his inmate peers — plenty to think about.

One family member called Crawford’s killer the son of the Devil. The three who spoke all urged him to repent, and were in varying stages of forgiveness.

And most of all, the abrupt, bitter and horrific loss of their loved one — which was shown on video in the trial — shone through their words again and again.

Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas S. Kleeh sentenced the killer to 188 months.

That was the maximum possible for his federal voluntary manslaughter conviction under U.S. sentencing guidelines.

The judge also ran the sentence consecutive to the term the killer already is serving, which already was scheduled to last until 2098.

However, the new sentence matters in this respect: The killer, Stephen C. Crawford, is serving time for a murder in the District of Columbia. If that sentence ever gets shortened or the conviction overturned, he still would have to serve the 15 2/3 years for slaying Arvel Crawford.

“You took a man’s life and you destroyed these people’s lives,” Kleeh said. “It’s been years and years since this happened, and they’re [still] not the same.”

Members of Arvell Crawford’s family indicated they can begin to heal some now that the trial has ended and Stephen Crawford has been sentenced.

One of Arvel Crawford’s family members implied that their wound runs even deeper because of all the time between the homicide and the sentence, something that could have been abridged through a guilty plea.

Stephen Crawford said the trial showed flaws in the Bureau of Prisons’ handling of Hazelton.

He added that in the 20 years he’s spent in prison, he’s seen a dozen murders and hundreds of stabbings.

Kleeh said he wasn’t even going to try to interpret prison society and apply those rules to the law.

Instead, the judge stayed firm on his ruling by saying repeatedly that the jury had rejected Stephen Crawford’s self-defense argument. Also, Kleeh said repeatedly that he didn’t buy that the crime happened in self-defense.

Stephen Crawford can appeal, and a statement in court indicated he would.

Assistant U.S. attorneys Brandon Flower and Andrew Cogar represented the Office of U.S. Attorney William Ihlenfeld.

The FBI investigated.

Attorney Doug Sughrue represented Stephen Crawford.

Stephen Crawford spent eight years in restrictive custody, first in Hazelton and then at ADX Florence, the highest-security federal prison in the country. He recently was moved to USP Victorville in California.