Anchorage prosecutor shortage leads to hundreds of criminal cases dismissed

Nearly a thousand criminal cases in Anchorage, including charges for alleged domestic violence or drunken driving, have been dismissed in the past six months because of a shortage of city prosecutors.

That’s according to an analysis by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica. Some of the cases involved allegations of men beating their wives or girlfriends, others with allegations of child neglect or abuse, and some that included clear-cut evidence of drunken driving, all of which were tossed out of court.

Anchorage officials are working to hire more city prosecutors, and on Tuesday the state Department of Law announced that state prosecutors would step in to help.

Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reporter Kyle Hopkins wrote the story. He says, at the heart of the hundreds of dismissals, is the defendants’ right to a speedy trial.

Listen:

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This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Kyle Hopkins: And in Alaska, it’s 120 days. If you get pulled over and charged with a DUI, or you get charged with, you know, police come to your house and arrest you for assault and take you away, and the city charges you, they have 120 days to put you in front of a jury. But what happened, this really unusual sequence of events happened this year, where around the springtime, defense attorneys started to realize that the city of Anchorage had so few prosecutors, you know, they had so few attorneys working for the city, that they just didn’t have anyone extra to actually go to trial.

And so, as soon as you take away the threat of trial, there’s no reason for a defendant to agree to a plea deal. You know, what they ended up doing was they called their bluff, you know, they called the city’s bluff, and they said, “Yeah, put me in front of a jury,” you know, and the city couldn’t do it. And so all these cases started falling off a cliff, essentially. I was not really aware of this issue. I went to a hearing, at what’s called a trial call hearing, I saw 60 cases getting dismissed, all for no other reason than systemic failure.

Casey Grove: What is the result then of people, you know, sort of continuing to just get away with this stuff, that their charges were thrown out?

KH: I was talking to one of my editors about it, and I was making a spreadsheet of, like, all the DUIs and all the domestic violence assaults that the city had dropped, you know, strictly because of the systemic failure. And at one point I realized, you know, I’m not seeing people charged with trespassing, and I’m not seeing people charged with shoplifting, and that’s because, that’s likely because those types of crimes aren’t even being charged, right?

So we’re at a point where, like, even before this started to happen, they didn’t really have the bandwidth to charge people with, like, property crimes, right? So now we get to the point where, now we’re not, we’re not convicting people, or we’re kind of, we’re just throwing out DV cases and we’re throwing out DUI cases. So we get to this point where it’s like, what are people being held accountable for? Like, you know, only felonies? Are we getting to the point where, like, the only thing you are going to get arrested for, convicted of in Anchorage is a felony, you know, because there’s just no bandwidth to deal with these lesser crimes?

CG: And then let’s talk about, you know, the victims in these cases, too. So a case would get dismissed, and if it was the type of case where there was a victim involved in that, they’re supposed to get notified so that they know what the outcome is. If their abuser or whoever is just going to be out walking free, like, that’s good for them to know, right?

KH: Yeah, there’s a state law that says, you know, if you’re a victim of a violent crime, including domestic violence, and there’s going to be a chance there’s a hearing coming up, and there’s a good chance that the case is going to be delayed significantly or dismissed, you’re supposed to get a heads up. And you’re also supposed to be notified if that case is dropped, and there have been so many dismissals because of this kind of breakdown in understaffing at the city prosecutor’s office that they just have not been able to keep up with this notification.

So one thing I was hearing as I talked to victims was they would say, “Yeah, no one ever told me I had to go look on CourtView. I just found out that this case was dropped. I didn’t know it was in danger of being dropped.” And the city just said, “Yeah, look, we are not doing that very well right now.”

And then another thing, which I didn’t really get into but I think is interesting, is, you know, we’re talking now, we’re well over 300 DUI cases that have been dismissed. But if you’re convicted of a DUI, you pay a pretty hefty fine. You pay I think, like, $3,000, and that money goes to the city. So there’s a, you know, in addition to kind of the just human cost and public safety costs and all those things, there’s like literally a price tag on this failure, which is, you know, a bunch of money that the city would have had in its coffers that it’s not going to have because of all those dismissed DUI charges.

CG: So what are they trying to do? I mean, I guess there have been some things that you reported on that were in the story that the city’s working on. There was an announcement more recently from the state about that. Let’s just start with the city. What had they been doing to try to get more attorneys in?

KH: They have filled some of these positions. They have new lawyers that they’ve hired. They’re still making hires. They increase the pay in hopes of recruiting more attorneys and be more competitive with other, you know, with the state and then, like, other places around the country that are competing for these prosecutors. They brought in a former city attorney to be the lead prosecutor, and they’re trying to do some mentorship. And so, you know, steps have been taken over the past few months to try and kind of stop the bleeding.

And the hope is, you know, what the city is saying, is that they hope that pays off in the coming months. But you still have this period in the meantime where, you know, it took a little while for this problem to get as bad as it did, and it’s really hard to just flip a switch and stop it all at once, because these cases that were nearing the speedy trial deadline, now they’re right at the speedy trial deadline, or they just passed. You know, people keep getting arrested, and so it’s been hard to catch up.

The announcement that just came through, like, just a little while ago, was from the state, saying that the state is going to try and find some way to have their state prosecutors step in and, you know, carry some of this burden as a stopgap measure. And I don’t know what that’s going to look like, and I was hoping to talk to the state soon about, like, “OK, what might that look like?” But, you know, that was something that had not happened and probably could have happened earlier, and now both the state and the city are saying that that’s in the cards.