Pimp given maximum sentence for murder

Spokane pimp Robert T. “Shorty” Spencer was sentenced Thursday to 44 3/4 years in prison for murdering a man who protected a prostitute Spencer kidnapped, assaulted and coerced.

The sentence was the most Superior Court Judge Harold Clarke III could give for the murder last November of James Alan Johnston and crimes that led up to the killing.

A jury convicted Spencer in August of second-degree murder, two counts of second-degree assault, first-degree kidnapping and first-degree promoting prostitution.

Clarke agreed with Johnston’s family and Deputy Prosecutor Matt Duggan that the crimes called for a maximum sentence.

“I don’t want another mother standing here in front of you, crying,” Johnston’s mother, Bobbi Johnston, said through tears.

“Please send him away for as long as you can. Please. My son will never come back.”

Duggan described James Johnston as a hero who would be alive if he had turned his back when 5-foot-2, 90-pound prostitute Jonna Pacello turned to him for help. It would have been easy to walk away, “but he didn’t do that,” Duggan said. “He took the hard way, and the right way.”

Pacello went to Johnston’s apartment above the Red Lion Barbecue at 128 N. Division after escaping from a downtown motel room where Spencer and another prostitute held her prisoner and assaulted her in an effort to force her to accept Spencer as her pimp.

Spencer discovered where Pacello had gone and followed her to Johnston’s apartment, where he again threatened her. But Johnston “stepped right in the middle to protect me,” Pacello testified in Spencer’s trial.

Spencer left, but returned later with a metal pipe and his nephew, 25-year-old Bryan M. “Squirrel” James. When Spencer resumed his efforts to assault Pacello, Johnston again intervened.

Spencer struck Johnston in the forehead with the pipe, a bicycle seat post.

Johnston fought back despite being cut to the bone, and James allegedly shot him to death. James faces trial in December on a first-degree murder charge.

State law says all parties to an assault or other felony in which someone is killed, even inadvertently, may be convicted of murder.

Assistant Public Defender Ken Dressler appealed for a minimum-standard, 35-year sentence on grounds that James is the true culprit and that Spencer, 42, is in poor health.

Although Spencer appeared healthy during his trial, he plans an appeal on grounds that an unspecified immune-system illness affected his mental capacity at trial.

Spencer has been hospitalized at the Airway Heights Corrections Center infirmary, and was wheeled into court Thursday with both of his arms splinted and his features puffy from drugs used in his treatment.

Johnston’s sister, Nancy Johnston, urged Clarke not to be swayed by Spender’s illness.

“If this piece of scum was released back into society, do you think he’d become a model citizen?” she asked. “No. He’d be out drugging and pimping from his wheelchair.”

Spencer said he was sorry Johnston died, but it wasn’t his fault.

“If I knew my nephew was going to shoot the guy, I would have stopped him,” Spencer said. “I would never get my nephew to kill no one. I’m not no killer.”

And another thing, Spencer added, “I want to set the record straight: I ain’t no pimp, and I ain’t no drug dealer.”

“He’s the crap on the bottom of my shoe,” Nancy Johnston said.