LAS VEGAS (AP) - A Nevada prison inmate was sentenced Wednesday to eight to 20 more years behind bars in a November 2012 shooting that badly wounded his brother-in-law as he drove to work before dawn on Interstate 15.
Richard William Pearson’s attorney, Josh Tomsheck, said his client accepted the consequences of his February guilty plea to felony conspiracy and attempted murder charges.
But Tomsheck said Pearson, 40, had been manipulated by others into acting to protect his sister and her children from an abusive home relationship.
“Rick was never motivated by financial gain,” Tomsheck said. “He was never offered money.”
Pearson is already serving one to five years in prison on a separate February 2012 grand larceny conviction. He wasn’t sentenced Wednesday as a habitual offender.
His sister, Amy Denise Bessey, 44, was convicted by a Clark County District Court jury and sentenced in March in Las Vegas to almost 14 years in state prison for conspiring with her brother and her son, Michael Bessey, to kill her estranged husband for $250,000 in insurance money.
Amy Bessey also used the name Amy Pearson. She cast herself as a battered woman who was desperate at the time to get out of an abusive 18-year relationship. She acknowledged during her trial that she told several people she wished her husband was dead, but she denied enlisting anyone to kill him.
Michael Bessey pleaded guilty in January to conspiracy and attempted murder. He could face up to 30 years in prison at sentencing June 9.
His former girlfriend, Courtney Smith, 21, is due for sentencing in July after pleading guilty to conspiring with Amy Bessey to kill Robert Bessey with an energy drink laced with poison on Father’s Day 2012.
Smith pleaded guilty almost a year ago to conspiracy to commit a felony, and testified in November against Amy Bessey.
Prosecutors alleged that Amy Bessey orchestrated the plots against Robert Bessey.
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