by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The evidence was overwhelming from the time it all began in 2017. A sexual assault in broad daylight at a popular Anchorage 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 still around his knees. DNA evidence corroborating the crime.

Yet in Alaska’s slow-motion court system, it took more than seven years for the case against Fred Tom Hurley III to finally go to trial, in December. Attorneys came and went with the passage of time — a series of six for the defense and four for the prosecution — as judges granted 50 delays. Most of the slowdowns came at the request of Hurley’s lawyers, long before and long 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.

Told the details of the case, former Florida state prosecutor Melba Pearson called it “a travesty of justice.”

“That’s a travesty. Period. End of story,” said Pearson, who recently co-authored a report on trial delays across the country.

What’s surprising isn’t how long the Hurley case lingered unresolved, but how ordinary it is in Alaska’s court system.

A recent Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica investigation found hundreds of misdemeanor criminal cases in Anchorage thrown out of court because overwhelmed city prosecutors couldn’t meet speedy trial deadlines.

But when it comes to felonies in Anchorage 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 especially 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.

In reality, 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. The median time to resolve the most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade, from just over a year in 2013 to 1,160 days in 2023. About 54% of people held in Alaska jails and prisons last year were there to await trial or, in a smaller number of cases, to await sentencing. That’s up from just 30% in 2016.

A courts spokesperson, Rebecca Koford, said by email that the state “is well aware of the issues with case backlogs and has been actively working to improve time to disposition.” Koford cited an Anchorage presiding judge’s orders limiting when postponements may be used, as well as new training for judges on managing case flows.

“We have made inroads in that direction,” she said, “but it takes time and continues to be exacerbated by the low number of attorneys who are able to handle complex criminal cases."

Some defense attorneys request pretrial delays to cope with overwhelming caseloads. According to the Alaska court system, Hurley’s current attorney, Rex Butler, represents defendants in at least 375 active cases, for example. (In an interview, the attorney said he sometimes hires other lawyers to help with that workload and noted that most cases do not require a jury trial.)

Time is generally a friend to a defendant. Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.

Attorneys also can employ delays as a tactic, increasing the odds their clients will walk free as the prosecution’s case ages. Defendants sit in jail or live on monitored release pending trial, but the wait can avert a heftier prison sentence.

The thought was captured in a 2017 email from a state-appointed defense attorney to his client, later made public in a court proceeding.

“Time is generally a friend to a defendant,” assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan wrote. “Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.”

The defendant had been questioning why his lawyer asked to delay his sexual assault case.

“You should not be in any hurry to take these cases to trial,” Corrigan replied.

Corrigan did not respond to a recent request for comment.

Terrence Haas, a former judge who oversees public defenders in Alaska, said that any lawyer who believes a delay is necessary or would benefit a client’s case is “bound by the ethics of their profession and duty of loyalty to their client to request a continuance.”

But one person has the power to say no to such requests: the judge. Records show Alaska judges routinely agree to such requests even after years of delays. These preventable failures have existed for more than a decade. What’s more, everyone saw it coming.

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