The evidence was overwhelming from the time it began in 2017. A sexual assault in broad daylight at a popular Anchorage, Alaska, park, with a witness who dialed 911 and described the attack as it was happening. A police officer hoisting the suspect from atop one of the victims, the suspect’s pants around his knees. DNA evidence corroborating the crime. In Alaska’s slow-motion court system, it took more than seven years for the case against Fred Tom Hurley III to go to trial, in December. Attorneys came and went -- six for the defense and four for the prosecution — as judges granted 50 delays, report ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News. Most of the slowdowns came at the request of Hurley’s lawyers, long before and after the COVID-19 pandemic paused jury trials across the state. At hearing after hearing, talks concerned scheduling, not the facts of the case.
For the two women Hurley was charged with assaulting, justice delayed meant justice denied in their lifetimes. Both died before the case ever reached the jury. Former Florida state prosecutor Melba Pearson called it “a travesty of justice.” Pearson recently co-authored a report on trial delays across the country.
What’s surprising isn’t how long the Hurley case lingered, but how ordinary it is in Alaska’s court system. Hundreds of misdemeanor criminal cases in Anchorage were thrown out of court because overwhelmed city prosecutors couldn’t meet speedy trial deadlines. When it comes to felonies and across the state, the opposite problem often exists for victims and witnesses: a wait of five, seven or even 10 years or more to reach trial, plea agreement or dismissal, often because of defense motions to delay. As a benchmark, the National Center for State Courts says 98% of felonies should be resolved in under a year. The extreme pretrial delays in Alaska are striking because it has one of the nation’s strictest limits on how long cases can drag out: 120 days from the time a person is charged. This deadline is rarely met. Over a recent 12-month period, only seven criminal cases went to trial within 120 days in Alaska state courts. The problem is getting worse.
Comments