U.S. District Court Judge Leonard T. Strand sentenced child actor Bobb’e J. Thompson, whose listed age is 30, to 30 months in federal prison. The plea that brought him there came in Iowa federal court, where he admitted guilt to possession of a firearm by a prohibited person — the charge more often called felon in possession.
Thompson was also ordered to serve three years of supervised release once he is out.
Criminal cases still pending against Thompson in Washington and Missouri may bring prison time of their own, and Strand ordered the 30-month term to run consecutively with whatever those courts impose. The Iowa sentence stacks on top of any punishment those courts hand down, and the two-and-a-half-year term will not be absorbed by anything else.
The judge recommended that Thompson serve the term in a federal prison in Oklahoma, Illinois or Kansas, or in “a Bureau of Prisons facility as close to the defendant’s family as possible,” according to his judgment.
The Traffic Stop in Iowa
A state trooper found a loaded, stolen pistol in Thompson’s car after he was clocked at 104 mph in Cerro Gordo County, Iowa, on September 22, 2025.
The U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Iowa laid out the encounter in a news release. An officer in northern Iowa stopped the vehicle after clocking Thompson more than 30 mph above the posted limit, the release said. It added that as the officer walked up to the car, he watched Thompson and the passenger trade seats, and that the officer reported the smell of marijuana coming from the vehicle.
A search produced a backpack holding bags of marijuana bought at a dispensary and a .40-caliber handgun loaded with a magazine holding a full 15 rounds. That pistol, Police said, had been reported stolen out of a car in Kansas City, Missouri.
A grand jury returned an indictment against Thompson on January 14, 2026, and his guilty plea followed on April 28, months before the sentence came down.
Prosecutors said prior convictions barred Thompson from carrying a gun. A Los Angeles court convicted him in January 2020 of battery with serious bodily injury and assault with force, and in 2022 he was convicted in Los Angeles of prohibited possession of a firearm.
Support From a Co-Star
Kyle Massey, Thompson’s co-star on “That’s So Raven,” spoke about him to TMZ on September 21: “Free Bobb’e J., man, that’s my brother.”
The people around Thompson, Massey said, would stand behind him and take care of whatever he needed, himself included, and they would be rooting for him no matter what. He said watching a friend or someone you love go through something that hard always hurts. He urged Thompson to keep his head up and told him he was loved.
A Career That Began at Six
Thompson’s television career began in 2002, at age six, on the sitcom “My Wife and Kids.” He played the son of actor Tracy Morgan’s character on “The Tracy Morgan Show,” and the two actors revived that pairing on “30 Rock.”
He played Stanley on “That’s So Raven” and again on its short-lived spin-off, “Corey in the House,” where the character was a nemesis to Corey, the younger brother of the title character. Many of those early roles ran on the same comic engine: a very small kid with an outsized mouth. His other credits include “Role Models” and “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne.”
As an adult, Thompson stayed in the orbit of Nick Cannon, whose series “Wild ‘n Out” gave him five seasons of work between 2018 and 2020. He returned to the show for a single episode in 2023, and he appeared in the 2021 VH1 film “Miracles Across 125th Street,” which starred Cannon. His most recent credit is the 2026 ALLBLK movie “Funny Thing About Love.”
A growing list of actors who came up through Disney have since been found guilty in federal court, and this case adds another name to it.