Crime & Courts

A Juneau man died in a Seattle hospital after a City and Borough of Juneau employee driving a city-owned truck struck him as he was lying in the drive-through lane of a bank in the Mendenhall Valley, police and city officials said.

Police identified the man who died as 38-year-old Armando Sanchez. The incident happened early in the morning of June 1 at True North Federal Credit Union on Postal Way.

Juneau Police Department spokesperson Erann Kalwara said the driver told police he did not realize Sanchez was there on the ground when the front bumper and tire struck him. 

“The man who was operating the Chevy truck, we found that he was not impaired, he was not injured,” she said. “There was no relationship between the person who was struck by the truck and the person who was operating the truck.”

Immediately after the incident, Sanchez could sit up and talk and had some abrasions on his back, according to police. He was brought to Bartlett Regional Hospital that day and was later medevaced to Seattle for further treatment. 

JPD was notified on Tuesday that Sanchez had died the day before. Kalwara said she did not immediately know if his death was due to injuries from the collision. 

“We’re going to be waiting for autopsy results. So there’s a variety of information that we’re still collecting to help with the investigation to determine with some finality what occurred,” she said. 

The city employee driving the truck has not been identified by police and has not been charged. City Manager Katie Koester told KTOO that the city is conducting an internal investigation of the incident. 

Kalwara said the police are also continuing to investigate what happened.

This story has been updated with additional information from the Juneau Police Department. 

Civil liberties advocates are accusing the Alaska Department of Corrections of unconstitutionally limiting prisoners’ access to attorneys at the state’s only all-female prison. The American Civil Liberties Union of Alaska made the allegations in a letter to the department last month.

ACLU of Alaska Prison Project Director Megan Edge said her group hears from hundreds of inmates every month, but not uniformly.

“We always thought it was odd we weren’t hearing from many women,” Edge said in an interview. So Edge said the group did some digging.

“Through a variety of different investigations, what we started hearing from women was that they did not feel comfortable writing the ACLU of Alaska because of the Department of Corrections’ mail policies,” she said. “The Department of Corrections is scanning and reading every legal document that’s going through it.”

Department of Corrections policy prohibits mailroom staff from reading or searching legal mail marked “privileged,” including correspondence with the ACLU.

But Edge said staff at Hiland Mountain Correctional Center in Eagle River aren’t treating inmates’ letters to and from the ACLU as privileged communication.

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals held in 2014 that prison officials can inspect outgoing legal mail to ensure it doesn’t contain things like contraband, an escape plan or a map of a prison. But the ruling prohibits correctional officers from actually reading legal mail.

The ACLU raised the issue to the Department of Corrections last month in a six-page letter detailing a variety of other issues that the group said violate prisoners’ First Amendment right to free speech and Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

Edge said ACLU staff have also heard prison staff listening in on phone calls between clients and their attorneys. And she said prisoners have been ordered to keep the door to a visitation room open while meeting with attorneys.

In one case she called “alarming,” Edge said Hiland Mountain staff failed to delete confidential files from an inmate’s criminal case from a shared computer, allowing other prisoners and correctional officers to see them.

“These are details that are sometimes the most private details of somebody’s somebody’s life,” she said. “It’s a dangerous situation for a variety of reasons, and that’s why discovery is supposed to remain confidential until it is allowed to be introduced as evidence in a court proceeding.”

According to the ACLU, the woman later received a letter from a senior Corrections Department official acknowledging the error. But the department did not outline steps to prevent it from happening again.

Asked for a response to the ACLU’s allegations, Department of Corrections spokesperson Betsy Holley said she had shared the letter with DOC Commissioner Jen Winkelman and the superintendent for Hiland Mountain, Brandon Jones. She said “matters requiring attention were addressed,” but did not respond to subsequent questions asking what was addressed, and how.

Edge said it’s possible correctional officers aren’t familiar with prisoners’ rights to communicate with their attorneys and that simply educating staff could go a long way. But failing that, she said the group will take “the appropriate next step to fix it.” She declined to say whether the group would sue.

NEW YORK — Former President Donald Trump has been found guilty of 34 counts of falsifying business records to influence the outcome of the 2016 election, a historic verdict as Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, campaigns again for the White House.

This is the first time a former or sitting U.S. president has been convicted of criminal charges.

On Thursday, 12 New York jurors said they unanimously agreed that Trump falsified business records to conceal a $130,000 hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 election.

The decision came after about a day and a half of deliberations.

Trump spoke to reporters outside the courtroom, calling it a “rigged, disgraceful trial,” and said the “real verdict” will be Election Day.

The jury heard from 22 witnesses during just over four weeks of testimony in Manhattan’s criminal court. Jurors also weighed other evidence – mostly documents like phone records, invoices and checks to Michael Cohen, Trump’s once loyal “fixer,” who paid Daniels to keep her story of an alleged affair with the former president quiet.

The facts of the payments and invoices labeled as legal services were not in dispute. What prosecutors needed to prove was that Trump falsified the records in order to further another crime – in this case violating the New York election law that makes it a crime for “any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” The jurors were able to choose whether those unlawful means were violating the Federal Elections Campaign Act, falsifying tax returns, or falsifying other business records.

Trump’s defense focused intently on the credibility of Cohen, and argued that influencing an election is not illegal.

The verdict came more than a year after a grand jury indicted Trump, on March 30, 2023, marking the first time a former or sitting president faced criminal charges.

Republicans quickly dismissed the indictment as an overreach of power by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who had brought the charges. Trump has continually blasted the case as “election interference” affecting his 2024 campaign.

What the jury heard

In August 2015, two months after Trump announced his 2016 presidential bid, David Pecker, then the publisher of the National Enquirer tabloid, met with Trump and Cohen at Trump Tower, according to testimony from Pecker and Cohen.

At that meeting, Pecker testified, it was agreed that he would be the “eyes and ears” of the Trump campaign. His job was to look out for negative stories from women he could “take off the marketplace,” by buying up the rights but never publishing them.

The plan, as Pecker outlined it, was that he would suppress these stories, and at the same time publish negative stories about Trump’s opponents. Some of these stories, Pecker said, were sent to Trump and Cohen for approval prior to publication.

Over the next year, Pecker said he carried out this role. His testimony was corroborated by Keith Davidson, an attorney who represented both Daniels and former Playboy model Karen McDougal. In about June 2016, McDougal considered going public with her story of a year-long affair with Trump. But Pecker bought the rights to that story, with the expectation that he would be reimbursed by Trump. That never happened.

In early October 2016, according to the testimony of former Trump communications aide Hope Hicks, the campaign was rocked by the release of the Access Hollywood tape, where Trump could be heard boasting “When you’re a star they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the p****.”

The next day, according to Pecker, Cohen and Davidson, Daniels threatened to go public with accusations she’d had a sexual encounter withTrump in 2006 in a Lake Tahoe hotel suite during a celebrity golf tournament.

In her testimony, Daniels said there was a “power imbalance” when, after leaving the suite’s restroom, she found Trump on the hotel bed in his underwear. That’s when, Daniels said, they had sex.

She testified that Trump had dangled a possible role on his TV show Celebrity Apprentice. This detail — that the sex wasn’t entirely wanted — caused the defense to request a mistrial, which was denied. It also provided a motive for Trump to suppress the story. Prosecutors said, “Trump knew what happened in that hotel room” and didn’t want it to come out. The adult film actor’s testimony also included intimate details of her alleged sexual encounter, some of which Judge Merchan agreed with the defense were not necessary.

As October drew to a close, Cohen testified, he frantically opened bank accounts and tried to come up with a way to pay the $130,000 to keep Daniels quiet. But Trump, Cohen said, wanted to delay the payment until after the election, with the idea that after that it wouldn’t matter if Daniels was paid.

This point, that Trump was making the payment to influence the election by keeping women voters on board, was corroborated by a number of other witnesses. Hicks testified Trump, by then in the White House, told her that it was better the story came out in 2018, rather than 2016.

Cohen ultimately wired the money himself to Daniels, with the understanding, he said, that he would be repaid by Trump. Cohen testified to a number of conversations with Trump, backed up by phone records, including on the day he wired the payments. But the defense rattled Cohen on cross-examination when it presented evidence that one of the calls which Cohen had said was made through Trump’s bodyguard, Keith Schiller, was instead with Schiller about threats from a 14-year-old prankster.

Still, the heart of the case rested on the testimony of what happened after the election, when the records were falsified, in particular the handwritten notes and documents from the Trump Organization’s former comptroller, Jeff McConney.

McConney authenticated a key record: the bank statement showing Cohen’s wire transfer. That record included handwritten notes from Cohen and Trump’s former chief financial officer, Allen Weisselberg, describing the $130,000 payment that would be “grossed up” to cover Cohen’s taxes. That sum, combined with another reimbursement and a bonus, for a total of $420,000, was paid out over 12 months at a rate of $35,000 per month.

The payments would be described as pursuant to a “legal retainer.” (Weisselberg, who is serving jail time for perjury in Trump’s civil fraud trial, did not testify.)

On the stand, Cohen described a repayment scheme that formed the basis of the 34 counts of falsified business records: 11 falsified invoices, 12 falsified ledger entries and 11 checks falsely recording the repayment as legal “retainers.” Nine of the checks were signed by Trump, himself.

Cohen said he and Weisselberg met and discussed the agreement with Trump shortly before he left for Washington, on or about Jan. 17, 2020. Cohen said Trump approved the deal, saying at the end of the meeting that “it was going to be one heck of a ride” in Washington. Cohen said he and Trump discussed the arrangement again, in early February, in the Oval Office. Photos and White House records corroborated that the two met in the Oval Office at the time.

The defense presented just two witnesses, including Robert Costello, an attorney who wanted to represent Cohen after Cohen’s home and office were searched by the FBI in 2018. Costello had been put on the stand to refute Cohen’s claim that Costello was pressuring Cohen to stay on Trump’s “team.” But Costello’s emails showed that Trump was deciding which of Cohen’s lawyers he wanted to pay, and that Costello was concerned about not giving “the appearance that we are following instructions from [Rudy] Giuliani or the president,” referring to the former New York City mayor who was Trump’s lawyer at the time.

How this conviction could affect the 2024 election

This likely is the only one of Trump’s four ongoing criminal cases that will be heard ahead of the 2024 election in November, since federal trials in Washington, D.C., and Florida, and a state case in Georgia are in various stages of delays.

This decision in New York is likely to have rippling effects as Trump campaigns as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. For now, the other 54 criminal charges he faces have not turned off potential voters and, among some Republicans, the cases have bolstered support for him. However, a conviction may not play well with independent and swing voters.

The latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, from May, showed that 17% of voters said they would be less likely to vote for Trump if he is convicted, while 15% said they would be more likely to vote for him. And 67% of registered voters nationally say it makes no difference to their vote if Trump is found guilty in his hush money trial.

A jeweler that operates two storefronts in downtown Ketchikan is being sued by the state for allegedly selling fake gold.

Attorney General Treg Taylor filed the suit Thursday against Soni, Inc., which owns Soni Jewelers and Colors Fine Jewelry, as well as an outlet inside Tongass Trading Company. The two stores are in the heart of downtown Ketchikan, directly across from the cruise ship docks.

The complaint also names the company’s director, Sunita “Soni” Lakhwani. In response to a request for comment, KRBD was told that Lakhwani was out of town and unavailable.

Assistant Attorney General Ian Engelbeck said state investigators made a series of undercover purchases from the storefronts, which sell Alaska-themed jewelry during the cruise ship season.

“In mid-September, our undercover investigator made a purchase, (which) was represented to her as a gold quartz ring with gold quartz mined in Alaska,” Engelbeck said. “We determined that we believed it was imitation, and we applied to the superior court in Ketchikan for an impound order.”

They received that impound order, which allowed authorities to confiscate 10 pieces of jewelry from each store. The state said they tested them in a lab and found them to be man-made “gold nuggets” and “gold quartz” from out-of-state suppliers.

According to the complaint, Soni, Inc. was passing this imported fake gold off as natural stones and nuggets mined in northern Alaska and handmade into jewelry by mostly Ketchikan-based jewelers. Salespeople also allegedly told the undercover investigators that natural gold quartz only occurs in Alaska and can only be legally purchased in Alaska, which is false.

“In addition, Soni Inc.’s salespeople point customers to elements of Soni Inc.’s jewelry that appear to be gold nuggets and proclaim that these are 24 karat Alaska gold nuggets,” prosecutors said in the complaint. “In fact, lab testing and the inventory control tags on many of these ‘nuggets,’ including ones that undercover investigators were told were 24 karat Alaska gold nuggets, show that they are actually imitations made of 14 karat gold shaped to resemble a natural nugget.”

One of the people in the store allegedly making false claims to undercover investigators was Lakhwani herself. The complaint said that when questioned by investigators, Lakhwani admitted that she wasn’t sure where the jewelry was made but did know that the stones weren’t from Alaska, as advertised. One Soni Jewelry employee allegedly told investigators, “(E)verybody thinks that’s from Alaska. So if the customer asks ‘it’s from Alaska?’ I’ll probably say ‘yes’ . . . But the piece comes from L.A.”

“These cases are important because it obviously hurts tourists who think they’re buying a genuine article,” Engelbeck said. “It also hurts businesses and Alaskan communities that are trying to do right and sell the real thing and it hurts Alaskan artisans who make the authentic thing and having imitation goods sold as real squeezes the real thing out of the market.”

State prosecutors asked the Ketchikan Superior Court to enter a temporary restraining order to prevent Soni, Inc. from continuing to sell fraudulent and misrepresented products. As of Tuesday afternoon, the storefronts downtown were still open and operating for the tourist season.

A federal grand jury in Alaska has indicted the man arrested by the FBI in Juneau earlier this month for allegedly stabbing multiple people with scissors aboard the Norwegian Encore.

Ntando Sogoni, 35, of South Africa is charged with one count of assault with intent to murder, three counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and three counts of assault resulting in serious bodily injury. 

If convicted, he could face decades of jail time. Sogoni was working on board the ship at the time. He’s currently in custody at Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Juneau. 

According to a release from the U.S. Department of Justice and a criminal affidavit filed in federal court, on May 6 cruise ship employees noticed Sogoni trying to deploy a lifeboat late at night. Ship security then brought him to the medical center for an assessment. 

There, early on May 7, authorities said Sogoni physically attacked a security guard and nurse in an examination room. He then moved to a different room where he grabbed scissors and stabbed a 75-year-old woman who was being examined, along with two other security guards. 

At the time, officials said the injuries were not life-threatening. Sogoni was later detained and held in the ship’s jail before being arrested in Juneau upon arrival. 

According to the release, the FBI continues to investigate the case. 

When Mary Lou Spartz was a senior at Juneau High School in 1948, she says she could hear the sounds of construction at the federal jail a block away from her classroom on 5th and Main Street. 

“We didn’t talk about it,” Spartz said. “But you’d sit in class and you’d hear the pounding on that building, and you couldn’t help but notice.” 

Spartz said when the murder trial was all over the news she didn’t think much about it. But when preparations started at the federal jail — where the State Office building is today — it began to trouble her. She said she knew it was for an execution. 

In 1948 and 1950, Juneau executed two Black men — Austin Nelson and Eugene LaMoore — for the murder of a local grocer. The trials, according to a legal historian who has researched them for decades, were riddled with misconduct and errors. 

Seven years after the second execution, Alaska’s Territorial Legislature abolished the death penalty. At the time, one of the legislators leading the abolition movement pointed out that capital punishment had been used almost exclusively against Black and Alaska Native people.

Now, Spartz is 93 years old. She lives just on the other side of Telephone Hill from her old high school classroom. She still recalls how her teachers and parents would avoid talking about the execution and she was left to draw her own conclusions. 

“All of a sudden, it kind of occurred to you that this was going to be taking the life of another person. I don’t think we thought of it that way. But there was something going on there that didn’t seem right,” Spartz said. “Didn’t seem right at all.”

Two men sentenced to death

On a December morning in 1946, grocer Jim Ellen was found dead in his store on Willoughby Avenue with his throat cut. Nelson, who had lived in Juneau for several years working odd jobs around town, was arrested the next day and charged with the murder.

In April 1947, a jury convicted Nelson of the murder and sentenced him to death. His lawyers never filed an appeal.

A second man would also be convicted for the murder ten months later. At Nelson’s trial, LaMoore took the stand to offer an alibi. He said he was with Nelson for some of the night and saw him on-and-off during the time when Nelson was accused of having committed the murder.  

After LaMoore’s testimony, prosecutors believed that LaMoore must have been involved with the murder as well. They charged him with perjury, and put him in jail, for the purpose of collecting enough evidence to charge him with murder. In 1948, another jury convicted LaMoore and sentenced him to death as well.

‘The duty to correct the record’

“LaMoore wasn’t charged until he had the audacity to try and testify on behalf of Nelson, at Nelson’s trial,” says Averil Lerman, a legal historian who has researched the two cases over the last 30 years. Sheʼs currently writing a book about these cases. 

She said the executions of Nelson and LaMoore fit a broader pattern in Alaskaʼs history of capital punishment. Nationally, the death penalty has been applied disproportionately based on race, poverty and access to legal representation. Those factors, Lerman says, have more to do with whether a defendant gets the death sentence than the severity of the crime committed or the evidence. 

Her research showed the same patterns held true in Alaska. 

“The answer was pretty overwhelmingly clear,” she said. “After 1903, the only people who were executed in the territory of Alaska were people who were not white — or people who were viewed as not white by the dominant white majority.” 

Lerman worked in criminal law for 20 years and as a post-conviction criminal defense lawyer, examining cases after the defendant received a guilty verdict to see if the conviction had been obtained legally and justly. 

“A medical examiner is someone who examines the remains of a person to determine the cause of death and the instrumentality of death,” she said. “I’m kind of like a legal examiner who can look at a conviction and the surrounding information and figure out whether the conviction was probably righteous or not.”

And in the post-mortem of Nelsonʼs and LaMooreʼs cases, nearly 50 years later, Lerman found a trial transcript that has stuck with her since. It was the testimony of LaMoore, the last person executed in Juneau. 

“The transcript that I found changed my life, and has tied itself to my ankle for all the years between now and 1994 when I found it,” she said. “It put a duty on me that I have not been able to shake. The duty to speak, the duty to correct the record.”

Lerman said the justice system failed Nelson and LaMoore at nearly every turn. 

“There was extreme prosecutorial misconduct in both of these cases,” she said, as well as serious error by the defense and by the judge.

A retracted confession

The prosecution built their case without any reliable forensic evidence — like blood, hair or fingerprints — in either trial. There was testimony in Nelson’s trial regarding blood, but it was inconclusive, a fact that was admitted by a witness in a written report to the prosecutor, but papered over by the witness at trial. There was no such evidence at all introduced against LaMoore. Lerman says that instead, the prosecution relied on testimony from people who were put under pressure to tell a certain story.

“Much of the prosecutionʼs trial evidence in both of these trials was obtained by either taking advantage of either witnesses who were in terribly vulnerable positions to ensure that they said what the prosecutor wanted them to say or by placing them in incredibly vulnerable positions in order to secure that testimony,” she said. 

The only physical evidence that tied Nelson to the crime was a check on the store counter with Nelson’s name on it, dated five days earlier.

At Nelson’s trial in 1947, the prosecution had one eyewitness: Dolly Silvers, who was held in the city jail for a month so she would testify against Nelson, Lerman said. Silvers told the jury she saw Nelson leaving Ellen’s store after two o’clock in the morning, by himself. 

After Nelson’s trial, LaMoore was charged with perjury because he didn’t initially admit to a 20-year-old felony in the state of California, even though he corrected that testimony to the jury. Using that charge, he was kept in jail and in solitary confinement for months, during which he was repeatedly interrogated without appointed counsel.

Then, on June 30, 1947 — the day before Nelson was due to be executed — Nelson told investigators that LaMoore was with him during the crime. Federal investigators brought Nelson to LaMooreʼs cell that day. Nelson apologized to LaMoore for implicating him and begged LaMoore to help save his life. 

The next day, LaMoore signed a typed confession. It said he went with Nelson to rob the store, and that LaMoore was in a different room when Nelson killed Ellen. The statement said LaMoore only found out about Ellen’s killing afterward, when he and Nelson left the store.

The prosecuting attorney filed for a stay of execution for Nelson that read, “it would be impossible to prove a murder charge against LaMoore without the testimony of said Austin Nelson.”

At his trial, in April 1948, LaMoore testified that the “confession” he had signed was false, and that it had been made in order to try to save Nelson’s life. LaMoore said that Nelson had been framed and that he believed that could be proved. 

“To give the man a chance to prove he was illegally prosecuted. He asked me to help him save his life,” LaMoore said on the witness stand when asked why he signed the confession.

Lerman says LaMoore’s confession doesnʼt line up with the evidence — or even with the story the prosecution told during Nelsonʼs trial about how the murder took place. 

The confession said the murder occurred around 12:30 a.m. Meanwhile, Dolly Silvers repeated that she had seen Nelson entering and leaving the store much later, after 2 a.m. 

Lerman said the prosecutors, the judge, and the investigators all likely knew the story didnʼt line up, but they wanted a conviction for the murder.

“The cases show that the convictions were obtained by prominent men who were determined to get that result,” she said.  Lerman says that LaMoore’s confession was obtained through coercion and should have been thrown out by the judge.

After a three-day trial, a jury convicted LaMoore of murder and sentenced him to death. A few weeks after LaMoore’s conviction, Nelson was hanged on March 1, 1948. LaMoore’s attorneys filed for an appeal, but it was rejected. LaMoore was hanged at the federal jail on April 14, 1950. 

Alaska abolishes the death penalty

No one has been executed by the government in Alaska since. 

Lerman says that’s likely in part because of Nelson and LaMoore. Their trials and executions changed the public perception of the death penalty in Alaska as its leaders began to shape the new state’s laws.

“The men who suffered this fate changed history,” she said.  

Warren Taylor was a member of the Territorial Legislature of Alaska in 1957. He and legislator Vic Fischer helped write the constitution for the territory, which was done to show the federal government that Alaska was ready for statehood. 

Taylor asked Fischer if he wanted to co-sponsor a bill abolishing the death penalty, according to Fischer’s 2012 autobiography To Russia with Love: An Alaskan’s Journey.

“When the time came, Warren rose and gave the greatest speech I ever heard in the Legislature,” Fischer wrote. “He went through the history of the death penalty in Alaska, the eight men hung, only two of whom were white Americans, although most murders were committed by whites. He related the shoddy evidence and procedures that sent the men to death, in cases that no jury would convict today.”

Taylor addressed the disparities of the death penalty during the bill’s hearings. 

“[The death penalty] now only falls on some poor, unfortunate, ignorant, homeless individual who was hornswoggled from the time he gets into court,” Taylor testified in 1957, the Fairbanks News Miner reported.

The Territorial Legislature voted to ban execution in 1957, two years before statehood. 

Have things changed? 

In the 1990s, the Alaska State legislature considered several bills to reinstate the death penalty. It wasn’t the first time Alaska Legislators introduced death penalty bills, but that’s when Lerman began studying the state’s history of capital punishment with the advocacy group Alaskans Against the Death Penalty.

She says that often when horrible crimes are committed, the community wants to see punishment and revenge, but those things aren’t the same as justice.

“Vengeance and justice are never going to be found in the same bed, by definition,” she said. 

When the justice system looks for someone to blame, the most vulnerable people often take the fall, she said. 

Juneau’s only other official execution happened in 1939. An Indigenous man living in Ketchikan named Nelson Charles was convicted of killing his mother-in-law. He claimed responsibility for her death after stabbing her.

But Charles, Nelson and LaMoore were not the only people convicted of homicide in Juneau. White men who committed murder rarely faced the same fate. 

“Between 1939 when Nelson Charles was hanged, and 1950 when LaMoore was hanged, there were many other homicides in Juneau and Southeast Alaska. None of the other wrongdoers, however, were executed,” Lerman said in 1995.

One of the prosecuting attorneys in the trials of Nelson and LaMoore, Robert Boochever, also worked on the case of George Meeks, a white man who was convicted of killing a construction worker in 1948. He was sentenced to life in prison. 

Lerman spoke to Boochever in 1995, when she was researching these trials.

“He stated that he believed that, if George Meeks had been black, he would have been sentenced to hang like Nelson and LaMoore. Instead, he was sent to the penitentiary,” she wrote.

Nationally, nearly 200 people have been exonerated from death row in the last 50 years, many by DNA evidence. While forensic science has come a long way, Lerman said the justice system still has many of the same problems it did in the 1940s, and she doesn’t want to look away from that. 

“You cannot avoid the fact that people are still getting wrongly convicted all the time in our courts,” she said. 

Since statehood, Alaska has never had a death penalty, but Lerman says it’s important to remember why that is. She’s close to completing her book about Nelson and LaMoore. She says it details the very human flaws of the justice system and the risks of giving it the power to kill.