By Rob Moritz
Arkansas News Bureau
LITTLE ROCK — The state Parole Board concluded Wednesday that the request for leniency of a former Greenwood teacher convicted of sexual assault of a teenage student is without merit.
The board said it would recommend that Gov. Mike Beebe deny Deanna Bobo’s request for a commutation.
Bobo, 41, submitted her request in July, when, for the first time, she admitted she had sex with the teenage boy. She is serving a 12-year sentence at the Department of Correction’s McPherson Unit for the 2006 conviction. A commutation could make her immediately eligible for parole.
Sebastian County Prosecutor Dan Shue opposed the request.
Bobo, formerly a special education teacher at Raymond E. Wells Junior High School, was arrested in November 2005 after the parents of a student at the school gave police a series of e-mails, some of them sexually explicit, that apparently were exchanged between Bobo and their son.
Following her arrest, Bobo claimed in statements to police and the news media that she was innocent. She also claimed innocence during her 2006 trial, after the teen testified that he had sex with Bobo twice in early 2005.
She also noted in her commutation request that she only had sex with the teen “after school hours and away from school grounds.”
In his letter opposing her request, Shue noted that Bobo now admits to lying on the witness stand about not having sex with the teenager.
Despite Bobo’s claim that she only had sex with the teenager off-campus, “the sexual intercourse occurred while the minor 14-year-old male victim was a student of Ms. Bobo’s, as testified to at trial,” Shue wrote.
The prosecutor also noted that two witnesses testified during the trial that they saw the teenager touch her breasts on school property and three other male witnesses testified that they had previously had sexual contact with Bobo at schools where she taught.
A Sebastian County jury found Bobo guilty of two counts of first-degree sexual assault. She was sentenced to six years on each count, with the sentences to run consecutively.
