Interior

The U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said Alaska is geographically important to meet growing threats in the Pacific theater.

The secretary stopped in Fairbanks on Friday on his way to Korea for security meetings. In Fairbanks, he met with personnel from Eielson Air Force Base and Fort Wainwright. Carter said funding cuts would likely reduce the level of armed forces stationed in Alaska.

In his brief address and meeting with select service members, Carter thanked them for their service, told them their work was important to the country and emphasized the strategic importance Alaska plays in global peacekeeping.

He took questions from the audience. One service member wanted to know if Alaska was strategically critical, why Army units were being cut. Carter partly blamed funding gridlock in Washington but also acknowledged priorities were shifting away from counterinsurgency wars, called COIN.

“Those of you in the Army know that the Army is reducing its size. A lot of that reduction has to do with the end of the COIN wars. The Army has decided it’s better, strategically, to use its funding elsewhere,” Carter said.

What Carter didn’t seem as prepared to address were questions from service members about sexual assault and suicide. He said sexual assault was fundamentally against the military’s code of honor and would not be tolerated. While acknowledging the rising number of suicides in the armed forces was disturbing, Carter broadened the context.

“I would be proud if we figured out suicide in a way that was not only helpful to our own members who are having that problem, but to society as a whole,” he said.

Carter said he admired the military’s ability to take on problems once they were identified.

The secretary was on to meetings in South Korea where he would take up China’s growing military presence in the South China Sea, among other topics.

A hearing to reconsider the murder convictions of the Fairbanks Four is beginning a fifth week.

The marathon proceeding is to hear new testimony about the 1997 beating death of 15-year-old John Hartman in downtown Fairbanks, a crime George Frese, Kevin Pease, Marvin Roberts and Eugene Vent, were convicted of.

They’re requesting exoneration largely based on identification of alternate suspects, including former Fairbanks resident Jason Wallace.

Jason Wallace allegedly made self-incriminating statements in 2003 about the Hartman murder, before being tried for an unrelated drug killing.  More recently, former drug ring partner, William Holmes, who’s also serving time for other murders, confessed involvement in the Hartman attack, pinning the actual beating on Wallace.

Wallace has been granted immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying at the Fairbanks Four hearing. On Friday under questioning by state attorney Adrienne Bachman, Wallace denied even knowing about the attack. He was a high school student at the time.

Bachman: “You lived in Fairbanks, AK in 1997?”
Wallace: “Yes, I did.”
Bachman: “How is it you didn’t hear about the John Hartman homicide?”
Wallace: “It wasn’t something I kept up with. I didn’t keep up with stuff like that.”

Wallace has appeared as a witness for state attorneys working to uphold the convictions of the Fairbanks Four. Bachman reminded Wallace that he was under oath then proceeded with specific questions about the Hartman attack.

Bachman: “Were you on the corner of Ninth and Barnett when John Hartman was attacked?”
Wallace: “No, I was not.”
Bachman: “Were you driving a car near the corner of ninth and Barnett when John Hartman was attacked?”
Wallace: “No, I was not.”
Bachman: “This is important stuff, sir. We need your honest testimony here. Did you have any involvement in that attack?”
Wallace: “No, I did not.”
Bachman: “As a driver?”
Wallace: “No, ma’am.”

The last response is specifically contradictory to Wallace’s chronicled statement to a public defender agency employee in 2003, in which he claimed to have driven a car carrying Holmes and other men, who got out and assaulted Hartman.

Wallace returned to the stand Monday as attorneys representing the Fairbanks Four resumed questioning.

The state has begun calling witnesses in the Fairbanks Four evidentiary hearing.

As the proceeding stretches into its fourth week, the focus has shifted from witnesses summoned by attorneys representing exoneration petitioners George Frese, Kevin Pease, Marvin Roberts and Eugene Vent to those offered by state lawyers trying to uphold the men’s convictions for the 1997 murder of John Hartman.

Monday, Fairbanks resident Stephen Paskvan testified that he gave Eugene’s Vent’s mother, Ida Hogue, a ride to the airport shortly after her son was arrested for the Hartman attack. Paskvan recounted a brief conversation in which he says Hogue shared something Eugene told her.

“That he assured her that, ‘Mom, I never got out of the car,’” Paskvan said.

The comment presumably references a car Vent and the other three men allegedly rode around the city in the night Hartman was assaulted on a downtown street.

Hogue testified she does not remember the comment, and doesn’t know Paskvan.

“I never spoke to him,” Hogue said.

Also yesterday, in a video deposition, cab driver Veronica Solomon recounts seeing four men around a car at the scene of the Hartman attack, about the time of the assault.

Solomon says she tried unsuccessfully to report it to police a few weeks later, but avoided news about the case until 2005, when she looked up a picture of the Fairbanks Four.

“Marvin Roberts clearly to me looked like the person that was standing by the door and, I think it was Kevin Pease, he’s the light colored person, I think I remember his name as being the one that looked like the person by the driver’s door,” Solomon said.

Solomon describes a car different from the one the Fairbanks Four are alleged to have been in the night of the Hartman attack.

Solomon says she shared her story with a State Trooper re-investigating the Fairbanks Four case last year.

 

Another one of Fairbanks men seeking exoneration from murder convictions has testified to his innocence.

Marvin Roberts is the last of the so-called Fairbanks Four, to address the court in an ongoing hearing to reconsider the 18-year-old case in light of new evidence.

Testimony closes out the petitioner’s side of the case with state witnesses now taking to the stand.

Marvin Roberts, George Frese, Kevin Pease and Eugene Vent were convicted of the October 1997 fatal beating 15-year-old John Hartman on a downtown Fairbanks Street.

The men, who were 20 or younger when arrested, following a night of partying, have testified during this month’s post-conviction relief hearing that they were scared and confused when police pinned the Hartman assault on them.

“I trusted police officers, and I took what they said at full, value up until they started accusing me of doing violent things,” Roberts said, addressing the court Friday.

Roberts, who unlike the others maintains he wasn’t drunk, outlines a night that included driving around the city with friends, but not Frese, Pease or Vent, and he additionally denies being at the scene of the Hartman attack, an issue state attorney Adrienne Bachman pressed him on.

Bachman: “I’m asking you whether you walked away from your car when you were at 9th and Barnette.”
Roberts: “I drove by 9th and Barnette.”
Bachman: “And you didn’t stop and get out?”
Roberts: “No.”

Bachman and other state attorneys are defending the original jury convictions of the Fairbanks Four, and will be going on the offensive this week as state witnesses are called. They include alternate Hartman attack suspect, Jason Wallace.

On the first day legislators were due back in Juneau for a special session, 20 protesters and one lawmaker brought the Fairbanks Four case to the Capitol.

It’s a sunny Saturday morning, and about 20 people are staggered along the steps leading into the state Capitol building. With their hands raised and four fingers pointed up, the protesters turn to face each pedestrian and car that passes in front of them.

Franklin Harvey James Jr. has a sign with a message: It’s not too late to exonerate.

“None of us believe that the case was handled right up there,” he said. “There’s too much left open. And it was handled too quickly … to appease the public, I would say.”

The Fairbanks Four were young men when they were arrested and charged with the shocking and apparently random murder of a 15-year-old boy named John Hartman. He was found severely beaten in the streets of Fairbanks in October 1997, and later died from his injuries.

According to a 2008 investigative reporting series by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the police investigators’ murder theory formed around a drunk teenager’s arrest on a different call that night. Over the course of about 11 hours in custody, Fairbanks police used coercive but legal interrogation methods on Eugene Vent, then 17. He confessed to the beating and identified three friends who also participated, George Frese, Kevin Pease and Marvin Roberts. Later, Vent recanted.

In three trials, three separate juries in Anchorage convicted the Fairbanks Four in 1999, despite lacking motive, eyewitnesses to the actual beating and physical evidence connecting the suspects and the victim. Three of the men are Athabascan and Kevin Pease is Crow Indian; the victim was white. The swift arrests and questionable case has fueled belief that racial prejudice was a factor.  

“Well, it’s just an example of inequality. It’s not right,” said Capitol protest organizer David Russell-Jensen. “And I think a lot of people are joining the movement, Free the Fairbanks Four.”

Russell-Jensen is a liberal arts student with an emphasis in Native studies at the University of Alaska Southeast.

“Alaska Natives make up 15 percent of the population but are 36 percent of the prisoners in the state. And it’s just unfortunate. It’s completely harmed their lives,” he said. 

Rep. David Guttenberg, a Democrat from Fairbanks, didn’t know about the protest, but addressed the Fairbanks Four on the floor of the House of Representatives. 

“I don’t know whether they’re guilty or innocent, but I know everybody in this state wants to see justice done. Not only justice for those four people and their family, but also justice for the family of Mr. Hartman, the young man that died that night,” Guttenberg said. 

His colleagues on the floor didn’t have an overt reaction to the speech. Afterward, Guttenberg elaborated on his position. 

“There was always something wrong about it with me,” he said. “I thought the issue needed to be elevated a little bit higher into the state. And the opening day of this special session, to say  something about it, I thought was appropriate. It was an important social issue and criminal justice issue.”

The Alaska Innocence Project is representing two members of the Fairbanks Four, seeking their exoneration based in part on new evidence. Eugene Vent is represented by the Office of Public Advocacy. George Frese is represented by Anchorage attorney Bob Bundy. The state maintains its prosecutors’ case against the Fairbanks Four.

Editor’s note: The Fairbanks Four’s legal representation has been clarified. An earlier version of this story suggested the Alaska Innocence Project represented all four.

Gov. Bill Walker’s administration has authorized spending  more than $3 million to start an environmental assessment for a proposed mining road through interior Alaska that was shelved amid the state’s multibillion dollar budget crisis.

In December, Walker issued an administrative order freezing six of the state’s biggest projects — including the Susitna Dam and the Knik Arm Bridge.

Among them was the Ambler Mining Road, a proposed 200-mile industrial corridor connecting the Dalton Highway north of Fairbanks to multiple deposits of copper, zinc, and gold near the northwest communities of Ambler and Kobuk.

Walker’s order halted any new spending on the projects, but an October memo from Pat Pitney, the director of the state’s Office of Management and Budget, shakes loose $3.6 million previously set aside for the Ambler Road’s environmental impact statement, or EIS.

“The choice for an administration is potentially turn the tap on or turn the tap off, but they can’t move money around for other purposes,” said Marcia Davis, Walker’s deputy chief of staff.

She said the $3.6 million comes from a $12 million pot of money lawmakers set aside under former Gov. Sean Parnell. Despite a multibillion dollar deficit, she says the money can only be spent on the road’s EIS. She says the governor has seen strong support for the project — which played a part in releasing the money.

“Because we got such strong advocating from the NANA Development Group, from NovaCopper, and from the different boroughs, we looked at it, analyzed it, assessed it, in terms of whether it could potentially repay funds back to the state. And we decided that we would draw the line at the feasibility and scoping part of the EIS,” she said.

But while support from the road has been strong from mining companies like NovaCopper — and the NANA Development Corp. says it supports the EIS process — the response at dozens of meetings with tribes and others living and working along the road’s proposed corridor have been more mixed.

The Alaska Industrial and Export Authority is the publicly-owned corporation leading the Ambler Road project. AIDEA’s held more than 30 public meetings on the road so far, from Kotzebue to Kobuk, and the responses have been varied, ranging from enthusiasm for potential mining jobs, to a wait-and-see approach, to firm opposition. The ANCSA corporation Evansville, Inc, whose land the road is tentatively set to pass through, even went so far as to formally declare opposition to the road.

One major sticking point: the cost. AIDEA’s own estimates range up to $300 million. Project contractor Dowl HKM has said that could climb as high as $400 million. Critics of the road say it could cost millions more.

AIDEA said it’ll be paid for through bonding and tolls, not public money.

Davis pointed to the road AIDEA built for the Red Dog Mine as a model for how the Ambler Road could play out.

“The cost was $267 million, roughly, and what we have received from tolls on that road so far has been $401 million. So we’ve already made $143 million on that, and stand to make more over time,” Davis said.

That road to Red Dog is just 52 miles — the road to Ambler could be four times the size. And it would cross a huge swath of the Interior that subsistence users say their fish and game rely on, especially the Northwest Arctic Caribou Herd, which winters on and migrates through land the road would bisect.

But road’s ultimate route and final cost are all estimates at this point.

AIDEA spokesperson Karsten Rodvick said money for the EIS preserves the work that’s already been done in the last 6 years and will launch the vital next step, a complex federal review process.

“We expect within the next few weeks to file the formal EIS permit application. At that point it goes into federal hands. And the scoping process is expected to take anywhere from 12 to 18 months,” Rodvick said.

That process means getting hands-on with federal agencies like the National Park Service as well as tribes and corporations who live and own land along the proposed route.