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.
Alaska officials have announced plans to help Anchorage city prosecutors take criminal cases to trial days after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported the municipality has dropped hundreds of cases due to low staffing.
Normally, the city prosecutes misdemeanor crimes that occur within city limits while the state prosecutes felonies. Over the next six months, the two governments plan to work together to stem the wave of dismissals. Deputy Attorney General John Skidmore said Tuesday that his department would provide seven to 10 state attorneys to aid the city government.
Those prosecutors would supplement the 13 the city said it had on staff as of last week.
“Public safety is one of the primary goals of any government,” Skidmore said in a written statement. “The Department of Law is not staffed to take on all misdemeanor prosecutions in Anchorage, but we are working to lend a hand to protect the public as best we can while the municipal prosecutor’s office gets back on its feet.”
“Many of our prosecutors live in Anchorage, so for many of us this is our community too,” he said.
The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica reported that from May 1 through Oct. 2, the Anchorage municipal prosecutor’s office dismissed more than 930 misdemeanor criminal cases because the state’s 120-day deadline to bring defendants to trial had expired or was about to expire. That number has now exceeded 1,000 cases.
The cases included defendants charged with domestic violence, child abuse and driving under the influence.
City officials said employee turnover and resignations had left the municipality without enough attorneys. In an effort to clear out a backlog of cases this year, judges forced prosecutors to regularly examine which cases would be ready for trial within the 120 days, and the prosecutor’s office routinely lacked the staff to move forward in time.
Anchorage Municipal Attorney Eva Gardner previously said the city asked the state for help back in April, during the administration of then-Mayor Dave Bronson, but was rebuffed. Skidmore has said city officials did not explicitly ask for assistance at the April meeting.
Gardner, who began working for the city in July under new Mayor Suzanne LaFrance, said that when she learned of the apparent miscommunication, she called Skidmore, and city and state lawyers met Oct. 8 to discuss potential solutions.
“The state has a willingness to help, and it’s just a matter of figuring out the best way to do it,” she said.
Including dismissals through Oct. 9, the municipality has dropped at least 279 cases of domestic violence assault and 313 drunken driving cases since May 1 because it was not able to meet speedy-trial deadlines, according to the news organizations’ review of court recordings.
Skidmore said the state plans to loan attorneys from the Office of Special Prosecutions and the Anchorage district attorney’s office, along with some former prosecutors working within the Department of Law’s civil division.
The city had already been working to recruit new prosecutors by offering additional pay this year, and city officials have said those efforts are beginning to pay off.
Gardner said that after the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica revealed the mass dismissals on Oct. 13, she also heard from retired prosecutors who expressed an interest in helping the new municipal attorneys take cases to trial. The city is exploring that option as well, she said.