Alaska Beacon

A special prosecutor on Friday charged former Alaska Attorney General-designee Ed Sniffen with three counts of third-degree sexual abuse of a minor.

Third-degree sexual abuse of a minor is a Class C felony punishable by two to 12 years in prison.

Alaska courthouses are closed on Friday afternoons, and the charges have not yet been processed by the Alaska Court System, but Deputy Attorney General Cori Mills provided the details in an email to Alaska Department of Law staff.

“Now that charges have been filed,” she wrote, “a grand jury will determine whether to indict based on the evidence presented to them.”

She added that the charging decision was made by special prosecutor Gregg Olson, “and all other prosecutorial actions in this case will likewise be handled by the special prosecutor.”

Reached by phone, Olson confirmed the information in the email but said he could not provide further details until the case has been processed and entered by the court system.

The charges are related to Sniffen’s alleged sexual relationship with a 17-year-old girl in 1991, when she was a high school student and Sniffen was the coach of her school’s mock trial team. Sniffen was 27 at the time.

The relationship came to light in early 2021 after an investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.

At that time, Gov. Mike Dunleavy had named Sniffen his preferred replacement for Attorney General Kevin Clarkson, who resigned after a different ADN investigation found he had sent hundreds of unwanted text messages to a subordinate.

Sniffen, who was never confirmed by the Alaska Legislature, had been a longtime employee of the Department of Law, joining the agency in 2000 and working in a variety of roles until his departure.

Attorney Caitlin Shortell, representing the woman in the alleged relationship, said she had no comment Friday and that the woman was unavailable for an interview.

Sniffen has been represented by attorney Jeffrey Robinson, who did not immediately answer a message left at his office.

In Mills’ letter to Department of Law employees, she said Sniffen worked alongside people at the department for many years.

“He was a valued colleague and to many of us, a friend,” she wrote. “Today’s filing of charges may be disappointing and even discouraging, but our department serves all the people of Alaska and is committed to fairness and justice for everyone.”

The Alaska Supreme Court on Tuesday confirmed that Alaska’s redistricting board gerrymandered the boundaries of state Senate districts in Anchorage in order to favor Republican-leaning Eagle River.

In a brief notice, the Supreme Court upheld a lengthy Superior Court order issued earlier this month.

“We affirm the superior court’s determination that the board again engaged in unconstitutional political gerrymandering to increase the one group’s voting power at the expense of others,” the Supreme Court wrote.

The courts’ decision means the redistricting board must adopt a different plan for this year’s legislative elections, ordered by the Superior Court judge. The board could continue work and possibly write a different map for the elections from 2024 onward.

The Senate map adopted by the board, known as “Option 3B,” joined south Eagle River with South Anchorage and Girdwood; north Eagle River was joined with Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson and the Government Hill neighborhood.

The result in Anchorage, based on voting patterns from 2016 through 2020, would have been two solidly Republican Senate districts, two solidly Democratic ones and four competitive districts, one Republican-leaning.

The court’s action means the board must adopt “Option 2,” which joins Eagle River into a solidly Republican Senate district. Option 2 also results in two solidly Democratic districts and five competitive districts, two of which lean Republican.

Tuesday’s court order is almost certainly the final word in redistricting before this year’s legislative elections. The filing deadline for candidates is June 1, and the Supreme Court is the option of last resort for legal appeals.

Significantly, its decision appears to confirm that Republican-appointed redistricting board members colluded to draw maps favorable to Republican candidates.

That isn’t entirely clear; the court said a more lengthy explanation will follow at a future date.

This article is developing and will be updated.

When Larry Pouliot went on a morning walk in Sitka National Historical Park on May 9, he spotted a lethargic, unresponsive bald eagle perched in a tree, its eyes bloodshot and its neck drooping.

“I realized he was not doing great,” said Pouliot, who got video footage and photos of the ailing bird.

He called the Alaska Raptor Center, a local bird rescue and rehabilitation facility. Within a couple of hours, Pouliot said, center responders who had been summoned to the site watched the eagle fall from the tree. It then died.

That was a confirmed case of the highly pathogenic avian influenza that has swept through poultry farms and wild bird populations worldwide and moved westward from the Atlantic coasts of Canada and the United States.

The arrival in Alaska of this unusually lethal strain, first confirmed last month by a case in a backyard chicken flock in the Matanuska-Susitna Borough and later documented among wild birds from the Aleutians to southeast Alaska, is a potentially ominous sign for the rest of the world.

Why avian influenza in Alaska is a problem

Alaska is both a reservoir and a distribution hub for avian influenza viruses. Each year, millions of birds migrate here from Asia, North America, South America, Australia and even Antarctica, converging to feed and breed in the near-continuous daylight. They crowd together, creating opportunities for viruses to exchange genetic material and get rearranged.

“Mutations can mix things up, quite literally, so that’s a concern,” said Andy Ramey, a U.S. Geological Survey wildlife geneticist who is an expert on avian influenza. Come fall, “as birds disperse, they can bring viruses with them, leading to outbreaks in new areas or new regions.”

The part of the world that scientists call Beringia – which encompasses the spot where Alaska nearly touches Siberia – is the usual pathway for Asian avian influenza viruses to enter North America. That was the case in 2014 and 2015, the last time a wave of highly pathogenic virus swept through U.S. and Canadian bird populations.

This time, the virus – linked to the Guangdong strain first identified in China in 1996 — appears to have moved west and been carried to the East Coast over the Atlantic. It was documented last year in the eastern Canadian provinces and possibly carried through an unusual assemblage of birds in that part of the world. By now, Ramey said, it is likely that the virus is moving around the world through various pathways and in various directions.

Along with Alaska’s geographic position as the bullseye for several migratory bird flyways, the state has other characteristics that make it a globally significant avian influenza site.

“The one thing about influenza viruses, especially avian influenza viruses, is they like a wet and cold environment,” said Bob Gerlach, Alaska’s state veterinarian.

Ramey’s research has found that influenza viruses can survive for more than a year in Alaska’s wetlands.

While wild birds in Alaska and elsewhere commonly carry low-pathogenic virus strains, which generally cause little harm, the spread within the wild population of high-pathogenic viruses is a significant change from the past, Ramey said.

Until now, only one case of a wild Alaska bird

Until about 20 years ago, highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses were thought to be solely a problem for domestic poultry. Before 2002, there was only one documented case of a wild bird infected with a highly pathogenic virus, he said. And until now, the sole documented case of a wild Alaska bird infected with a highly pathogenic virus came from a mallard found in 2016 in Creamer’s Field in Fairbanks.

“So this is kind of new territory,” Ramey said. “Now we have high-path influenza that’s persisting and being maintained in wild birds.”

Just why that is happening is the subject of much research. Some scientists have warned that climate change, which is accentuated in Alaska, is shifting migration patterns and creating new assemblages of bird species in their Beringian summer gathering sites, thus increasing the risks of influenza spread.

For now, it appears unlikely that this influenza will have population-level effects on Alaska’s wild birds, Ramey said.

So far, known infections in Alaska are mostly among eagles and Canada geese. Raptors seem to be vulnerable, in Alaska and elsewhere, possibly because they are eating sick or dead birds that carry the virus, Ramey said.

Avian influenzas are generally more common among waterbirds found in freshwater systems – geese, ducks and swans – than in seabirds, including those species that have been hit by successive years of die-offs in the Bering Sea region, he said.

There are 28 Alaska species that the USGS, though its past work on avian influenza, has designated as high priority for monitoring.

Species of special concern worldwide, Ramey said, are those with relatively low numbers. In Alaska, that includes two species listed as threatened, Steller’s eiders and spectacled eiders, he said.

As for the sightings of sick and dead birds to date, eagles and geese may be dominating simply because they are the most visible birds, Gerlach said. “Some of these other dabbling ducks are small, and if they do die and get swept to the side they may not be as noticeable,” he said.

The arrival of highly pathogenic influenza right after the bird die-offs is unfortunate, even if some species are more vulnerable than others, Gerlach said. “In this case, this is another stressor on the population, and what impacts it’s going to have will be really unknown,” he said.

Jumping across species

Also yet unknown is how this strain might spread beyond birds.

Avian influenzas have jumped across species in the past, including to marine mammals, Gerlach pointed out. This year, federal biologists will be looking for the virus in Alaska’s marine mammals, he said.

There is already precedent for this virus to spill over into mammals. Foxes in the upper Midwest and Canada have been found with this virus, including a kit found dead in Ontario.

In Alaska, biologists will be watching this year for potential spread to marine mammals, among other animals, Gerlach said.

As for humans, so far only two people have tested positive for this avian influenza, one in the United Kingdom and one in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

It is rare for avian influenza viruses to harm human health, experts say. But when that happens, the results can be devastating.

The deadly pandemic that started in 1918 and killed at least 50 million people was caused by a virus that originated in birds, scientists say. More recent severe influenza pandemics have also been caused by avian viruses, including the 1957 Asian flu and the 1968 Hong Kong flu, according to the CDC.

Rep. Geran Tarr, D-Anchorage, is relieved her bill to modernize the definition of consent passed this year. “When I think about a policy like a massive public safety improvement, if we delay action, I know that between now and the next time I or anyone else will have the opportunity to address that, hundreds more Alaskans will be harmed,” she said during a phone interview Thursday.

When a sexual assault is reported, a key element of establishing whether an assault took place is determining if consent was given. Current Alaska law requires the use of force or the threat of force. Simply saying no isn’t enough to establish that consent wasn’t given. Doing nothing at all or freezing — which is a common response to trauma — can be seen as consenting. The law has been like that for the past 40 years. On May 18, the last day of the regular legislative session, the House and Senate voted unanimously to change how sexual assault can be prosecuted by modernizing the definition of consent.

“Alaska took a gargantuan step forward in updating our laws,” said John Skidmore, deputy attorney general for the Criminal Division of the Alaska Department of Law. He spoke during a governor’s press conference Thursday.

Under the bill, consent is defined as “a freely given, reversible agreement specific to the conduct at issue… ‘freely given’ means agreement to cooperate in the act was positively expressed by word or action.” The bill includes a provision for the trauma response of freezing: “lack of consent through words or conduct means there is no consent… lack of consent does not require verbal or physical resistance and may include inaction.”

Another provision of the bill criminalizes rape by fraud, which means “you cannot impersonate a person known to the victim in order to obtain consent,” Skidmore said. It also codifies a reduction in the timeframe for sexual assault kits to be processed to six months; the law currently requires rape kits be processed within a year.

Bipartisan, unanimous support

After more than a dozen committee hearings, Tarr’s bill on consent, House Bill 5, was still in the House Finance Committee on May 17, two days before the end of regular session. So Tarr was “looking for any vehicle possible that was a public safety piece of legislation that we might have been able to insert the language into. [House Bill] 325 was the perfect vehicle,” she said. Tarr coordinated with House Bill 325 sponsor, Anchorage Republican Rep. Sara Rasmussen, “who was amazing and wanted to do everything she could to help get this across the finish line.”

On the last day of regular session, Palmer Republican Sen. Shelley Hughes and Juneau Democratic Sen. Jesse Kiehl worked together and made impassioned arguments for adding Tarr’s House Bill 5 as an amendment to HB 325, which was on the floor.

Hughes said: “57.7% of Alaska women have experienced sexual violence or intimate partner violence, at least in one form or another, in their lifetime. That’s roughly six out of 10 women. That’s three out of five, Mr. President. There are five female legislators in this body, and 13 in the other body; statistically speaking, 10 of us are victims. That is how unsafe our state has become for women and girls.” 

The Senate voted unanimously to pass the amendment and the bill. “There have been moments of ugliness, some ugliness this session, but we also know in this chamber how to work together,” Hughes said. The House voted unanimously to concur with the changes to the bill.

Wait and see

Tarr credits Standing Together Against Rape (STAR) with identifying the outdated consent definition and making it a legislative priority to fix it. STAR, based in Anchorage, is a sexual trauma prevention and response organization.

“We are so pleased and elated that it passed. It was a long time coming,” STAR communications and development director Jennifer Brown said on the phone Friday. Brown hopes passing the bill will “send a message to perpetrators that violating someone who can’t consent or someone who says no – there’s going to be consequences for that now.”

And she hopes it will impact survivors. “We hope that more of our clients will be able to get justice because of the changes in the law,” Brown said. “But we will have to wait and see what happens, if the percentage of prosecutions goes up.”

Three minutes before 11 p.m. on the last day of its regular session, the Alaska Legislature finalized a state budget that will pay each eligible Alaskan about $3,200 later this year.

As late as Saturday, it appeared possible that the House and Senate would agree on a $5,500 payment, but lawmakers settled on a lower amount after days of negotiations and a failed vote to spend from savings.

“For the four years I’ve been down here, we’ve practiced fiscal restraint and tried to keep money in savings, make sure we put Alaska’s future on the front foot, and that’s where my vote came from today,” said Rep. Grier Hopkins, D-Fairbanks, who cast the decisive vote against spending from savings to increase the payment from $3,200 to roughly $3,850.

House Minority Leader Cathy Tilton, R-Wasilla, was among those who supported a larger payout and said she was disappointed by the result.

“Alaskans are the ones who lose out,” she said.

Speaker of the House Louise Stutes, R-Kodiak, refused to answer questions from reporters after the conclusion of the session, instead attending a gift-giving ceremony and celebration for staff.

The $3,200 payout is expected to cost $2.1 billion and is the largest component of a budget that also pays for services and construction projects from July 1 this year through June 30, 2023.

Budget among largest in Alaska history

Alaska is expecting a surge in oil revenue due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and the Legislature spent most of that surge, boosting the share of the budget funded by taxes and Permanent Fund transfers to $8.4 billion. That’s the 10th-largest in state history, when adjusted for inflation.

Add fee-funded and federally funded programs, and the budget is $16.2 billion, the second-largest in state history.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy may veto some projects from the budget in the coming days, which could lower the total, and the figure could rise next spring during the Legislature’s annual supplemental budget process.

While the budget includes hundreds of millions of dollars in construction projects, grants to K-12 schools and hundreds of millions of dollars in savings, the Permanent Fund dividend and the energy relief payment were the focus of attention in the final days of the session.

The Senate approved a $5,500 payout, but the House rejected the Senate’s plan on Saturday, requiring negotiators to come up with a compromise. They settled on a budget paying $3,850 per recipient, with $2,600 coming from the Permanent Fund dividend and $1,250 from the energy relief payment.

Half of the energy payment was to be paid with $420 million from the Constitutional Budget Reserve, but spending from the reserve requires 15 votes in the Senate and 30 in the House. The Senate met the mark, and Dunleavy urged House members to agree, but the House fell one vote short as savings-minded Democrats and independents voted against it.

All of the House’s Republicans, plus 10 members of the predominantly Democratic coalition majority, voted for spending from the reserve.

Despite the failed vote, the $3,200 payment — the exact amount will depend on the number of PFD recipients this year — will be the second-largest in state history when adjusted for inflation.

“This is a give and take. We give, sometimes we have to take,” said Sen. Bert Stedman, R-Sitka.

Members cite energy costs in arguing for higher payout

Rep. Mike Cronk, R-Tok, urged members of the House to vote in favor of the budget and a larger energy payment, saying he’s received many messages from constituents worried about rising energy prices.

“Everybody’s going to be hurting. I’ve seen the emails, I’ve seen the messages,” he said.

Rep. Mike Prax, R-North Pole, added to the pressure.

“Times are tough. People are in a dire position, so if we can do anything to help them this year, I think that’s the appropriate thing to do,” he said.

But about half of the House’s governing coalition felt differently, voting in favor of keeping money in savings instead.

After the House vote, Senators who supported the bigger payout tabled a key election-reform and campaign-finance bill supported by lawmakers who voted against spending from savings.

Sen. Jesse Kiehl, D-Juneau, said it was a pressure tactic intended to force them to change their votes. Senate President Peter Micciche, R-Soldotna, said the failed reserve vote discouraged senators from pursuing the bill.

Pressure tactic or not, holding the bill failed to change the result: A revote ended with a wider margin against the $3,850 payout.

The campaign finance bill died when the session ended, which means candidates in this year’s election may accept unlimited amounts of campaign contributions.

Budget not the only bill passed at session’s end

The House and Senate passed many other bills in the last hours of the legislative session, including an education reform bill, a major revision to state law dealing with sexual assault, new restrictions on child marriage and reliable funding for the state’s college scholarship program for high school students.

“If you could divide my feelings precisely in half, half would be elated, and half would be disappointed,” Micciche said.

“I think the only failure was about politics, and it wasn’t about policy,” he said.

The three Republican-appointed members of Alaska’s state redistricting board unconstitutionally gerrymandered a map of Anchorage state senate seats to favor Republican candidates, an Anchorage Superior Court judge ruled late Monday night.

“In summary, the totality of the circumstances leads this court to conclude that the majority of the board acted in concert with at least a tacit understanding that Eagle River would again be paired in such a way as to provide it with two solidly Republican senate seats — an unconstitutional partisan gerrymander,” Judge Thomas Matthews said.

The decision will be appealed to the Alaska Supreme Court, the redistricting board’s executive director said. 

But with the filing deadline for this fall’s legislative elections only two weeks away, Matthews has ordered the board to implement an alternative map no later than May 23 for this year’s elections. 

That alternative, preferred by local community councils, incumbent Republican Senate candidates and a majority of public testifiers, will create a firmly Republican state Senate district covering Eagle River and result in competitive or Democratic-leaning seats elsewhere.

Eva Gardner, who represented a group of Girdwood residents that sought to overturn the board’s map, said the plaintiffs “were pleased to receive the court’s decision late last night.”

“I think this should matter to anybody who cares about the political voice of small communities in Alaska, which is really most communities in Alaska,” said Jennifer Wingard, a member of the Girdwood Board of Supervisors and a plaintiff in the case.

“This is about not giving Eagle River — which has 5% of the vote — 10% of the Senate and 10% of the clout,” Wingard said.

This is the second time that Matthews has found that the board acted inappropriately to favor Republican candidates. In February, he ruled that the board’s first-draft map of Senate districts in Anchorage was unconstitutional and that the board’s three Republican-appointed members had secretly colluded to create it.

The Alaska Supreme Court upheld Matthews’ ruling, which ordered the board to go back to the drawing board.

The board redrew the map, but the new result linked South Anchorage and south Eagle River and drew an immediate lawsuit from Girdwood residents who opposed it. Their lawsuit resulted in Monday’s order, which drew an immediate protest from the board.

“We believe the trial court erred in its decision and that Option #2 denies JBER voters their equal protection rights under the Constitution. We will be requesting expedited review by the Alaska Supreme Court,” said redistricting board director Peter Torkelson.

Republican members used ‘secretive procedures’

Alaska’s five-person redistricting board is the body that redraws the boundaries of the state’s legislative districts to account for changes in population as measured by the U.S. Census.

Its members are appointed by high-ranking state officials, but its work is supposed to be nonpartisan, and it’s illegal to draw the lines to favor a party or candidate.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy appointed registered Republicans Bethany Marcum and Budd Simpson. Former Senate President Cathy Giessel, R-Anchorage, appointed registered Republican John Binkley.

Former Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, I-Dillingham, appointed Nicole Borromeo, and former Alaska Chief Justice Joel Bolger appointed Melanie Bahnke. Borromeo and Bahnke are undeclared voters.

In the first case, Matthews cited evidence of “secretive procedures” and public comments by board members before declaring that Marcum, Simpson and Binkley had coordinated to benefit Republican-leaning Eagle River by splitting their votes between two Senate districts, in effect giving local voters a greater voice in the Senate at the expense of their neighbors.

When instructed to redo their work, board members again split Eagle River, joining north Eagle River in a senate district that also covers JBER and portions of downtown Anchorage.

The board argued that it then had no other choice but to pair south Eagle River with South Anchorage because local options had been blocked by the first court order.

‘Existence of discriminatory intent is key’

Matthews concluded that was wrong. Although the three majority board members explained in detail why they believed north Eagle River should be joined with JBER and downtown Anchorage, they failed to explain why that made more sense than joining Eagle River together in one Senate district.

“There was little discussion of the obvious pairing of the two Eagle River house districts,” Matthews said.

There was no testimony in favor of the pairing from JBER residents or from local governments or community councils in Eagle River, Matthews said, and there was significant testimony against the idea from local residents and community councils in Anchorage.

“This does not mean that JBER and Eagle River, or Girdwood and Eagle River, can never be paired together in a senate district. It is, however, highly unlikely that this Board, given its past actions, can legitimately split Eagle River into two senate districts. The existence of discriminatory intent is key,” Matthews said.

Attorney Eva Gardner, representing the Girdwood residents opposed to the new plan, provided evidence showing secret emails and phone calls between the three Republican-appointed members of the redistricting board.

Gardner said that was circumstantial evidence — there was no proof of what those communications were intended to do — and Matthews agreed, though he said it carries some weight.

“The evidence is quite clear that a pattern of markedly partisan correspondence between specific board members occurred, and aligns with the intent found during the first round of litigation,” he said.

In and of itself, that isn’t enough to rule the map illegal, Matthews said, but he concluded it was enough to shift the burden of proof from plaintiffs to the board. 

Board ‘amplified conservative voices’

Board members repeatedly said that they wanted to preserve the interests of “military voters” on JBER and in nearby Eagle River, but Binkley and Marcum each said publicly that they believe military voters are more conservative.

“Although Board members repeatedly couched their reasoning in terms of ‘military voters,’ as the Board’s argument confirms, Board members either knew or assumed that JBER residents preferred the same political candidates as Eagle River, i.e., Republicans. The Board thus candidly admits that its decision to pair JBER with North Eagle River was to amplify conservative voices by creating a safe Republican senate seat,” Matthews said.

Under prior precedent, that’s unconstitutional.

In 2002, the Alaska Supreme Court wrote, “Neither military personnel nor members of any other group have any constitutional right to be divided among two or more districts to maximize their opportunity to influence multiple districts rather than control one.” 

“This is precisely what the Board sought to do for Eagle River,” Matthews said.