'Very Dearly Sorry': Mafuta Sentenced for Killing Cellmate

Mbyayenge “Robbie” Mafuta on Friday Credit: Pool: Glenn Russell/VTDigger

A young man who killed his prison cellmate will spend at least six more years behind bars, bringing an end to a case that involved a perpetrator who suffers from serious mental illness.

Mbyayenge “Robbie” Mafuta, 23, admitted last fall to voluntary manslaughter for fatally beating Jeffrey Hall inside Northwest State Correctional Facility. On Friday, he faced state Judge Alison Arms in a St. Albans courtroom to receive his sentence.

“I’m very dearly sorry,” Mafuta told the judge, as several members of Hall’s family sat silently in the courtroom gallery.

The plea agreement between Mafuta and state prosecutors called for eight years in prison, plus 25 years on probation. Mafuta will receive credit for the two years he has already spent incarcerated.

But Mafuta could spend as long as 30 years in prison if he violates any terms of the deal, including that he participate in mental health treatment upon his release.

In December 2022, Mafuta attacked Hall in the cell they shared, incapacitating Hall, who died a few months later. The attack occurred two days after Mafuta spent a brief time in a segregation unit following a mental health episode. He’d reported hearing voices and having thoughts of harming himself or others, according to an excerpt of a clinician’s note included in court documents.

Hall’s family is separately suing the private medical provider with whom the state contracted to provide care to inmates at the time, alleging that Mafuta was not properly evaluated before he was placed in the cell with Hall.

Mafuta had been charged with second-degree murder following Hall’s death, which his public defenders had planned to rebut using an insanity defense. In a 2023 cover story, Seven Days reported on Mafuta’s troubled upbringing as an immigrant child in Vermont and how he later struggled with hallucinations and homelessness.

Franklin County State’s Attorney Bram Kranichfeld said on Friday that the agreement took Mafuta’s mental illness into account.

“While we do not agree that it excuses his behavior, we do feel that it is a mitigating factor,” he told the judge.

Arms expressed some reservations about the plea agreement on Friday before accepting it. Court documents stated that Mafuta and Hall had had a “disagreement” over Hall’s alleged theft of other prisoners’ belongings, but neither the prosecution nor the defense had offered an explanation of what role, if any, mental illness played in the assault.

“The court does not know what the genesis of the disagreement between them was,” Arms said. “What really happened in those few moments in that cell?”

The judge also said the parties had not offered evidence that the mental health treatment available to Mafuta during his ongoing incarceration would be “sufficient.”

She credited Mafuta, however, for taking responsibility for his actions, saying it weighed significantly on her decision to accept the plea agreement.

Hall’s family members supported the deal, Kranichfeld told Arms, but they did not speak during Friday’s hearing and quickly left the courtroom after it concluded.

Standing before the judge, Mafuta said he wanted to take care of himself so he could start a new life once out of prison, “whenever the doors do open.”

“I will prepare myself to become an independent man,” he said, “to live on my own, to be able to live a structured life, to have the mental stability to live and to be around the community and not have to fall back into my past patterns.”