Tommy Robinson, Colorful Arkansas Sheriff and Congressman, Dies at 82

Tommy Robinson, who over two terms as a county sheriff in Arkansas in the 1980s made repeated national headlines with stunts like chaining inmates to a prison tower to protest jail overcrowding, and who then used that reputation to win three terms in Congress, died on July 10 in Forrest City, Ark., east of Little Rock. He was 82.

His daughter Fran Moseley confirmed the death, in a hospital. She said that while he had been ill recently, a cause of death had not been determined.

Mr. Robinson was once among Arkansas’s best-known political figures, referred to universally by his first name or simply “T.R.” His unconventional, often outlandish behavior won him hordes of admirers, but just as many enemies.

“People either loved or hated my dad,” his daughter said. “There was no in between.”

In 1981, when the jail in Pulaski County, the home of Little Rock, became dangerously overcrowded with state prisoners, Mr. Robinson ordered his deputies to take 19 of them to a nearby state prison; when the warden refused to take them, he had the men chained to a guard tower.

And when the state police threatened to return them, Mr. Robinson ordered his men to form an armed cordon around the county jail.

“Let’s have a standoff,” he told reporters, adding that if things got hot, he would put shotguns in their hands and make them deputies.