Brutal Indy home invasion leader gets sentence tweak

Dave Stafford for www.theindianalawyer.com

The alleged ringleader of six men who brutalized, shot and sexually assaulted three north side Indianapolis residents in their home will still likely spend the rest of his life behind bars after the Indiana Court of Appeals modestly reduced his sentence Tuesday.

Adrian Anthony led five others into a suburban home occupied by a couple and their 24-year-old daughter after a night of drinking and drugging, according to the record. They entered the home through an open garage door at about 5:15 a.m. on Oct. 29. 2013, and terrorized and brutalized the family for the next two hours. The women were sexually assaulted by the intruders, and the mother was shot in the leg and foot as she attempted to get help.

The men also ransacked the home and forced the women to drive to their bank and withdraw money from an ATM. The burglars ordered the husband, who relied on leg braces and a cane to walk, to stay in bed with his head down or be shot.

“The State maintains that Anthony was a leader of his five fellow defendants, was armed with a revolver when he entered the residence, and did not hesitate to shoot [the mother] on two separate occasions during the two-hour incident,” Judge Elaine Brown wrote for the panel. “It points out that Anthony forced [mother] to the bank for money and sexually assaulted her, that he later separately forced [the daughter] to the bank for cash, and that he ‘acted more as a principal then an accomplice, was highly culpable for commission of the offenses, and … concedes that the offenses were reprehensible.’”

Anthony was charged with 35 counts, seven of which were dismissed, and a jury convicted him on the 28 remaining counts. Convictions were entered on two counts of rape, three counts of criminal deviate conduct, robbery and burglary all as Class A felonies; robbery and three counts of carjacking as Class B felonies; and robbery as a Class C felony.

The Court of Appeals rejected Anthony’s appeals on the sufficiency of the evidence, whether his two rape convictions constitute double jeopardy, and whether his sentence was inappropriate in light of the nature of the offense and his character.

However, the court found a robbery conviction that was enhanced to a Class A felony charge was impermissible because it was based on the same injury to the mother that also enhanced a burglary conviction to a level punishable by up to 50 years in prison.

“We order that Anthony’s conviction … for robbery as a Class A felony be reduced to robbery as a Class B felony and that his sentence on that count be reduced from fifty years of incarceration to twenty years of incarceration, resulting in an aggregate sentence of 268 years,” Brown wrote for the panel in Adrian Anthony v. State of Indiana, 49A02-1505-CR-369.