A top Alaska lawmaker said the state needs to hire twice as many prosecutors and public defenders if it wants to end the kind of extreme courtroom delays that the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica exposed over the past year.
Rep. Andrew Gray, chair of a legislative committee that holds jurisdiction over the Alaska court system, prosecutors and public defenders, said the news organizations’ stories of criminal cases delayed for years “stab my heart.” The time it takes to resolve Alaska’s most serious felony cases is three years, or more than twice as long as in 2015.
“I hate how slow this system is. It kills me,” Gray said.
The blame, he said, should not fall on the front-line attorneys but on the state of Alaska for failing to hire enough prosecutors and public defenders.
Gray is the latest official to respond to stories in the Daily News and ProPublica revealing how delays can harm criminal defendants and crime victims alike.
Susan M. Carney, chief justice of the Alaska Supreme Court, said in February that the system was “not meeting expectations — our own or Alaskans’” when it comes to the swift execution of justice. The next month, the court ordered new restrictions on pretrial continuances.
But Gray said that beyond the court order, it will take new resources to meet the goal of resolving more cases quickly. The court system’s own standard for speedy trials sets a 120-day deadline, which is rarely met.
(Gray, in an interview, and Carney, in her speech to the Legislature, both noted that the median time to resolve less serious charges is far faster than for the most serious felonies: Class B misdemeanors — crimes such as criminal mischief or shoplifting — are closed within a median of about four months, Carney said.)
Victim advocates, attorneys and judges told the newsrooms that Alaska has grappled with increasing delays for decades.
Gray said lawmakers, who write the state spending plan and started a new legislative session on Tuesday, should include additional funding to reduce the caseloads carried by prosecutors and public defenders.
“I don’t know exactly what the number is, but it will be a big one,” Gray said. “And yes, I would absolutely advocate for that.”
Retired Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Niesje Steinkruger, who worked as a public defender and assistant attorney general, agreed that inadequate staffing places a strain on attorneys on both sides who are being pushed to resolve cases faster.
“It puts those lawyers in just an awful position. They are type A personalities: They want to do the best that they can.”
Jacqueline Shepherd, an ACLU of Alaska attorney who tracks pretrial delays, agreed about the need for more front-line attorneys. According to a 1998 audit for the Legislature, public defenders can “ethically” handle no more than 59 cases at a time. Shepherd said some public defenders in Anchorage are asked to juggle 140 to 170. “Obviously, they are overloaded,” she said.
But she said that adding staff alone won’t be enough to solve the problem. Judges, she said, need to start bucking Alaska’s culture of courtroom delay and make sure cases are moving toward trial or dismissal.
Gray, a Democrat in traditionally red Alaska, became chair of the Judiciary Committee because Alaska’s Senate and House are currently run by bipartisan majorities.
His proposal for more money is likely to prove difficult in a state that has no state income or sales tax and faces revenue shortfalls made deeper by low oil prices.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy, a Republican, in December proposed a plan that would shore up services by spending from reserves while also setting the annual oil wealth dividend each resident receives at $3,650, a big increase over previous years. The dividend payout would cost twice what Dunleavy has requested for public safety, courts and prisons combined.
A spokesperson for the governor did not directly answer a question about whether Dunleavy would support doubling prosecutors and state defense attorneys. However, the spokesperson noted that funding for prosecutors and defense attorneys has already increased under Dunleavy in an attempt to reduce caseloads and backlogs.
State budget documents show spending on the Department of Law, which employs state prosecutors, was $123 million last year — or 42% higher than it was in 2018, when Dunleavy was elected. Spending on two agencies that oversee state-appointed defense attorneys was a combined $87 million, a 69% increase. The Department of Public Safety’s spending also rose by the same percentage.
“Improving public safety has been Gov. Dunleavy’s top priority throughout his time in office,” spokesperson Grant Robinson said.
The boost to defense attorney and prosecutor budgets was due in part to a bill passed in 2022, part of an effort to raise pay and improve retention and recruitment.
Gray said that effort was a good first step that helped fill vacant jobs. But he said the next step is to expand the workforce.
“They need to acknowledge that even being fully staffed, they are overworking their folks and that is the reason we are seeing these cases that drag on for an eternity,” he said.
But House Finance Co-Chair Andy Josephson, D-Anchorage, said any effort to double the number of those attorneys is unlikely to succeed this year. The state is too strapped for cash, he said.
“It’s the same reason why the Anchorage School District has a $78 million budget deficit,” said Josephson, a former prosecutor who oversees the Department of Law budget and sponsored the bill increasing state attorney salaries. “For decades, we have been trying to give people dividends and not tax them, and the system is exhausted by those two things.”
Over that same span, victim rights advocates noticed longer and longer delays for the most serious criminal cases.
Some dragged on for so long that victims died before seeing justice, such as two women sexually assaulted in broad daylight in one of Anchorage’s most popular parks. The attacks occurred in 2017, yet it took seven years and 50 delays for the case to go to trial in December 2024. The jury found the defendant, Fred Tom Hurley III, guilty of two counts of second-degree sexual assault but not guilty of one count of sexual assault.
Another case took even longer: 10 years. In all that time, as judges allowed 74 delays, no one in the courtroom ever asked the victim what she wanted. A key witness died along the way. A jury in April found the defendant, Lafi Faualo, guilty of first-degree sexual assault and first-degree assault involving a weapon but not guilty of one count of sexual assault.
Faualo’s defense attorney was juggling some 375 active cases before the trial.
In another example of extreme delays, Kipnuk resident Justine Paul spent seven years in jail for murder after being indicted on key blood evidence that proved within one year to be flawed. Meanwhile, the killing of his girlfriend Eunice Whitman remains unsolved, with the investigation only recently reopened.
State officials say the situation has improved since the state Supreme Court’s order limiting pretrial delays took effect in May.
Rebecca Koford, spokesperson for the Alaska Court System, said that as of Jan. 1, 2026, there are 743 pending felony cases that are more than two years old — 16% of all felonies. That’s an improvement from Jan. 1, 2024, when there were 1,428 such cases, representing 22% of the total.
The court’s order on delays, combined with earlier efforts in 2023, “have led to significant progress,” Koford said. “Judges have been limiting continuances, stacking trials and using every resource available to move cases forward expeditiously and fairly.”
Still, the latest annual report from the Alaska Criminal Justice Data Analysis Commission noted that cases continue to take longer than they did in 2019 and before.
Gray acknowledged it will be very hard to get lawmakers to agree on more money for attorneys.
“But we must have that debate,” he said, “because that is how we solve this problem.”
Great Job Kyle Hopkins & the Team @ ProPublica Source link for sharing this story.
