A man appealing his sentence in Coffey County on kidnapping and robbery charges had that effort denied by a Kansas Court of Appeals panel.
Ronnie L Sanders, 53, was serving a 15-year prison term in Georgia when he was brought back to Coffey County on a criminal case. He pleaded guilty to two counts of kidnapping and one count of aggravated robbery and was sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Sanders’ Coffey County sentence was to be served concurrently with, or at the same time as, the Georgia sentence. However, when Sanders was released from Georgia, he had actually been on probation since 2006 and was not returned to the Kansas Department of Corrections to finish his Coffey County sentence. The Department of Corrections then issued a warrant for Sanders’ arrest in 2014 and said he had served a little more than half his sentence.
Sanders initially argued unsuccessfully he should have received credit for time served but later abandoned that argument. Instead, he pursued an argument saying Kansas did not specify Georgia’s probation would not count in Kansas and was thus illegal because it was ambiguous.
The Court of Appeals panel, however, said the ruling specified time spent in confinement and affirmed the sentence.
