The story of the Fairbanks Four could fill a book, and now it does.
It's called "The Fairbanks Four: Murder, Injustice and the Birth of a Movement" and chronicles how the men -- three of whom are Alaska Native -- were convicted with scant evidence in the beating death of a white teenager on a Fairbanks street in 1997.
Marvin Roberts, Eugene Vent, Kevin Pease and George Frese spent two decades behind bars, until another man came forward to say it was actually his group of friends that had killed John Hartman.
The Fairbanks Four were released in 2015 and only recently did the last of them win a settlement after suing for wrongful conviction.
The book's author, University of Alaska Fairbanks professor emeritus Brian O'Donoghue, says the controversial case had a racial component from the beginning.
Below is the transcript of an interview with O'Donoghue on Alaska News Nightly. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Brian O'Donoghue: Shoddy police work caused them to sweep the four up (and) not pay much attention to Marvin Robert's alibis. And he is the one that I've always referred to as "the kid with the car." The car was essential to the scenario the police had for, you know, how they jumped out of a car, stomped this white kid to death, jumped in the car and got away.
And as we looked into it, and I got students year after year in my investigative reporting classes looking, picking apart this case, it just started adding up that Marvin Roberts had good alibis, and I think he's the only reason that this ever got a second glance. And how can you turn your back on that, as far as I was concerned?
Casey Grove: I guess, you know, full disclosure, I was in some of those classes, right? And we've known each other for a while.
It just seemed like there were so many questions about that police work that, in the very least, you know, we wanted to answer those, right?
BO: It was not settled in any way that these four guys were all innocent, but what was pretty clear is that it couldn't have unfolded the way the police said. We did things like my students were interviewing jurors, because we just couldn't figure out, why did you convict this guy? And one or two jurors said there was this one witness that was just so clear and so believable.
But what he claimed to see at night, after drinking for hours, across a distance of, I don't know, it was 350 or 400 feet? We went out and stood there, and every single time, students who took part in that just were astonished, because there's no way anyone could have seen what he claimed to see. And that resulted in jurors at the time, which we also learned, going outside to test it themselves during deliberations, and so that actually mattered more than the reality of what we discovered.
CG: And just from a technical, like, legal standpoint, they weren't allowed to have gone and done that without the judge's permission.
BO: No. You know, it was lunchtime or something, and they wanted to get a little air, and they'd been in the, you know, jury box for a couple days, and a courthouse employee let them go outside. No one knew about it until we discovered it, I think about two or three years later.
CG: Was there a moment, though, where you realized, you know, all four of them should be found innocent?
BO: Somebody confessed to a prison guard that, you know, they had killed the younger kid before the one that they were in jail for. And the state, I believe, sat on that information. They were notified by the prison guard. They sat on that information for about two years. But when that came to light, then, you know, it really became a huge necessity to free these guys.
CG: And, I mean, do you feel like now that Marvin Roberts has gotten a settlement and the other three had previously gotten settlements, is it over? I mean, what happens next?
BO: That is... that's not up to me to say. But you know, what I hope the book does is leave people clear about what happened and who was responsible and focus some attention on the state law department's absolute intransigent stance, refusing to recognize or act on the evidence that these guys were innocent. I mean, the book, I hope, will focus attention on that and lead to, hopefully, a different approach when these kind of things happen.
CG: This is a big case. This has been going on, you know, since I was a teenager in Fairbanks, and I remember talking about it a lot. But are there bigger societal issues that you think are at play here that, you know, either came to light through this case that people have talked about changing in Alaska, or things that need to be changed still?
BO: OK, you tell me that if four white kids, including one that was a scholar student, were swept up in something like this, when it turned out that there was no evidence against any of them, no blood splatter, nothing that you'd expect to find at the scene of this kind of vicious murder, that those kids wouldn't have been kicked loose? I don't believe that.
I think the fact that three out of four of them are Native, I think that that was a big factor, and I think that kind of thing still may well occur around America, and we ought to recognize that.
