About two dozen people gathered in the Arkansas Capitol this weekend to honor the life of Rolf Kaestel, an Arkansas man who served 40 years of a life sentence for using a toy gun to rob a Fort Smith restaurant of $265 in 1981.
A crucial whistleblower in the Arkansas prison blood scandal, Kaestel was granted clemency by Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson and released from prison in 2021 after decades of fruitless petitioning for parole. He died from cancer on Feb. 25 of this year, at the age of 72.
The memorial was held on the third anniversary of Kaestel’s release from prison. Speakers included lawmaker and soon-to-be mayor of Pine Bluff Vivian Flowers, Arkansas-born filmmaker Kelly Duda and Dennis Schluterman, the victim in Kaestel’s robbery. The speakers have a long history with Kaestel, and all publicly petitioned for Kaestel’s release for years.
Kaestel’s story highlights larger systemic challenges in Arkansas’s criminal justice system, including overly heavy sentencing and mass incarceration, they said.
“Arkansas has, over the last 10 years, moved between [having] the first-, second- and third-highest incarceration rate in a country that has the fifth-highest incarceration rate in the world,” Flowers said. “We, as the United States, have the highest incarceration rate, by far, of any developed, wealthy nation.”
Schluterman, 18 at the time of the robbery, said he didn’t know Kaestel was serving a life sentence until years later, when Kaestel apologized to him in a letter....
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