Inmate's consecutive sentence stands

SANDPOINT — A former Bonner County man doing time for a stabbing in Clark Fork has lost his appeal of a sentence for assaulting a fellow inmate at the Idaho State Correctional Institution in 2007.

Kenneth Dean Rawley was sentenced to two to five years in connection with the prison assault. The sentence was set to run consecutively to his 12- to 15-year sentence in the stabbing case.

Rawley challenged the judgment and sentence in the prison assault case, but the Idaho Court of Appeals affirmed them, according to unpublished opinion filed on Wednesday.

Rawley’s argument in the appeal was not outlined in the brief, two-page opinion.

Rawley’s assault on the inmate was serious enough to require hospitalization of the victim, said Idaho Department of Correction spokeswoman Teresa Jones. He was convicted of the offense last year in Ada County’s 4th District Court.

A Bonner County jury convicted Rawley of aggravated battery in 1st District Court in 2005. He was accused of stabbing a patron at the former Out of Bounds Tavern in the early morning hours of New Years Day that year.

He allegedly punched several revelers while being forced outside the tavern and stabbed a fourth in the neck outside the bar. Prosecutors in the case said it was a miracle the stabbing victim, Blaine Ben Stevens, then 26, was not slain.

Rawley, 50, appealed his conviction in the Bonner County case, arguing that a district judge improperly denied a motion for a mistrial and that his sentence was excessive. He also claimed prosecutorial misconduct and due process violations, but the appeals court rejected the arguments last year.

Rawley was transferred from ISCI and is currently held at the Idaho Correctional Center in Kuna, a state-owned facility operated by the Corrections Corporation of America.

He becomes eligible for parole in 2025, according to the Idaho Department of Correction’s Web site.