A man who was convicted of murder as a 17-year old in Christian County and who was paroled 10 years later is back in prison after accepting a plea deal for a bank robbery in Georgia.
James Crick was convicted in 1974 for the November, 1973 murder of John Thomas Muster, whose body was found in a wooded area near the Pennyrile Parkway north of Hopkinsville. Crick was granted parole in 1984 and had been living in Dalton, Georgia in October of 2017 when he committed his most recent violent crime.
It was there he entered a Wells Fargo Bank, pointed a pistol at two employees and demanded cash. He fled with approximately $13,000 cash, but was arrested by Whitfield County, Georgia sheriff’s deputies within minutes. Police say he still had the gun and cash with the bank wrappers on it.
Crick accepted a plea deal last year in federal court for bank robbery and gun charges and was sentenced to nine and a half years in prison.
Georgia has a two-strike law for violent felonies and Crick could have been sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in the local superior court. A judge ruled in January that it would not constitute double-jeopardy for the State to prosecute Crick on its counts of armed robbery and assault.
The new plea deal comes with a 20-year sentence without the possibility of parole, meaning he will be 83-years old before he could possibly be a free man. If he lives through his sentence, he would be on probation for the rest of his life.