The shortage of prosecutors in Anchorage is causing hundreds of criminal cases to be dismissed

Nearly a thousand criminal cases in Anchorage, including charges of alleged domestic violence or drunken driving, have been dropped 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 cases involved allegations that men had beaten their wives or girlfriends, others involved allegations of child neglect or abuse, and in some cases there was clear evidence of drunk driving. All cases were dismissed out of court.

Anchorage officials are working to hire more prosecutors from the city and, on Tuesday, the state The Justice Department said prosecutors would step in to help.

Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reporter Kyle Hopkins wrote the story. In his opinion, at the heart of the hundreds of dismissals is the defendant’s right to a speedy trial.

Hear:

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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 are stopped and charged with driving under the influence, or you are charged, the police come to your house, arrest you for assault and take you away, and the city charges you, they have 120 days to prosecute you to be tried by a jury. But what happened, this really unusual series of events occurred this year, when around the spring, the defense attorneys realized that the city of Anchorage had so few prosecutors, you know, they had so few lawyers working for the city that they just… I had no one left who could actually go to court.

So once you remove the threat of trial, there is no longer any reason for a defendant to agree to a settlement. You know, what they ended up doing was they called their bluff, you know, they called the city’s bluff and said, “Yeah, put me in front of a jury,” you know, and the city was able to do it don’t do it. And so basically all of these cases started falling off the cliff. I wasn’t really aware of this problem. When I went to a hearing, a so-called trial, I saw 60 cases dismissed, all for no reason other than a systemic failure.

Casey Groves: So what’s the consequence of people, you know, continuing to just get away with this stuff, having their accusations thrown out?

KH: I was talking to one of my editors about this and I put together a spreadsheet of, like, all the DUIs and all the domestic violence assaults that the city has stopped, you know, just because of the failure of the system. And at some point I realized, you know, I don’t see people getting charged with trespassing, and I don’t see people getting charged with shoplifting, and that’s because that type of crime probably doesn’t even get charged, right?

So we’re at a point where even before this happened, they didn’t really have the bandwidth to charge people with property crimes, right? So now we’re at the point where we don’t convict people anymore, or we just throw out DV cases and DUI cases. So we get to the point where the question arises: What are people being held accountable for? You know, just crime? Are we getting to the point where the only thing you’re going to get arrested and convicted of in Anchorage is a felony, you know, because there’s just no bandwidth to deal with these smaller crimes?

CG: And then we also talk about the victims in these cases. So a case would be dismissed, and if it was a case involving a victim, they should be notified so they know what the outcome is. If their abuser or whoever is just going to walk around free, that’s good for them to know, right?

KH: Yes, there is a state law that says: If you are the victim of a violent crime, including domestic violence, there is a chance that you will have a hearing and there is a good chance that the case will be significantly delayed or dismissed, you should be aware of this. And you should also be notified when the case is dropped, and there have been so many layoffs because of this kind of staffing shortage in the city prosecutor’s office that they just couldn’t keep up with that notification.

When I spoke to the victims, I heard them say, “Yeah, no one ever told me I had to watch CourtView.” I just found out that this case was dropped. I didn’t know there was a risk of it falling down.” And the city just said, “Yeah, look, we’re not doing very well at the moment.”

And then one more thing that I haven’t really gone into but that I find interesting: You know, we’re talking about now that well over 300 DUI cases have been dismissed. But if you are convicted of drunk driving, you will pay a pretty hefty fine. They pay, I think, about $3,000 and the money goes to the city. So there’s, you know, in addition to the sheer human cost and the public safety cost and all of those things, there’s literally a price to this failure, which is, you know, a lot of money that the city would have had in its coffers that it won’t have because of all these dismissed DUI charges.

CG: So what are they trying to do? I mean, I think there were some things that you reported that were included in the story that the city is working on. There was recently an announcement from the state about this. Let’s just start with the city. What had they done to attract more lawyers?

KH: You have filled some of these positions. They hired new lawyers. They are still hiring new employees. They’re increasing the salary in hopes of hiring more lawyers and being more competitive with other, you know, the state and then other places around the country that are competing for these prosecutors. They have hired a former city attorney as lead prosecutor and are trying to provide some mentorship. And so, over the last few months, steps have been taken to somehow stop the bleeding.

And the hope is, you know, what the city is saying is that they’re hoping that this will pay off in the coming months. But in the meantime, there’s still that phase where it took a while for the problem to get as bad as it was and it’s really difficult to just flip a switch and stop everything at once because that In these cases, they were close to the speedy trial deadline, now they have reached the speedy trial deadline, or they have simply passed it. You know, people keep getting arrested and so it’s difficult to catch up.

The announcement that came through just recently came from the state and said that the state will try to find a way to have its prosecutors step in and, you know, share some of that 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, “Okay, what might that look like?” But you know, that was something that didn’t happen and probably should have happened sooner can, and now both the state and the city say that is on the horizon.

Casey Grove is anchor of Alaska News Nightly, general assignment reporter and editor at Alaska Public Media. Reach him at[email protected]. Read more about CaseyHere.