Former Arkansas Congressman and sheriff Tommy Robinson died yesterday in Forrest City at age 82. The politician, who made plenty of arrests (and plenty of enemies) as Pulaski County sheriff in the early 1980s, was a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and served in the Navy before beginning his storied career in law enforcement.
In addition to his controversial role in the 1983 trial and 1995 execution of death row inmate Barry Lee Fairchild, Robinson was embroiled in headline-making overtures — chaining inmates to a fence outside a Pine Bluff jail in the summer of 1981 to call attention to the problem of prison overcrowding, for example, then threatening a showdown with the State Police should officers show up and try to return the prisoners. As sheriff, “he started ‘Robinson roulette,’” the Encyclopedia of Arkansas notes, “in which deputies with shotguns would rotate in hiding at participating retailers. He declared the program a success in rural Pulaski County, but a clerk was shot to death in a participating store in Little Rock.” Heck, he threatened to commandeer this very publication once, in an interview for a 1982 story called “Galiano v. Robinson: Who Is Telling the Truth?”:
On his subsequent political career, from the Encyclopedia of Arkansas:
He was elected to Congress in 1984 as a Democrat representing the state’s Second Congressional District. He was named to the House Armed Services Committee and to the Education and Labor Committee. During his three terms, Robinson sponsored six bills in Congress, none of which ever left to committees to which they were assigned. He frequently voted with the Republican administration of President Ronald Reagan. During his third term, he switched to the Republican Party—a significant enough event at the time that President George H. W. Bush marked it with a White House press conference.
From there, with the apparent encouragement of national Republican Party chairman Lee Atwater, he campaigned for the Republican nomination for governor. (Atwater reportedly spotted Governor Bill Clinton as a potentially troublesome rival for Bush and saw Robinson as a candidate who could fight a rough enough campaign to disable Clinton politically, if not defeat him.) In a tough contest, Robinson lost the nomination to Sheffield Nelson, a businessman and another recent convert to the GOP. The totals showed that the vote in the state’s Republican primary was unusually high, particularly in Pulaski County, where there were twice as many voting in the Republican gubernatorial primary as had voted in the 1988 GOP presidential primary. (Robinson lost in Pulaski County by 8,321 votes and statewide by 8,127 votes.) As part of a stop-Robinson movement, Democrats had reportedly switched over to vote in the Republican primary in sufficient numbers to provide the margin for Robinson’s defeat.
Robinson left Congress in 1991, but not without more controversy. In a scandal over congressmen overdrawing their accounts in a bank operated for the U.S. House of Representatives, Robinson was reported in 1992 as the top offender. He had 996 overdrafts, totaling more than $250,000.
Robinson, who had a farm in Brinkley (Monroe County), tended to his crops and business interests until the 2002 race for Congress. In 1999, Governor Mike Huckabee placed Robinson on the Arkansas Pollution Control and Ecology Commission, and the next year placed him on the State Parole Board. In 2002, he ran in the First Congressional District, which includes Brinkley. He lost to the incumbent, Marion Berry, a conservative Democrat. Huckabee put Robinson on the Arkansas Rural Development Commission in 2005.
Encyclopedia of Arkansas