Public Safety

A former assistant bank manager has been sentenced in federal court to 33 months in prison for stealing money from a Juneau bank, the Mendenhall branch of Keybank.

Antonietta “Ann” Robinson, 44, of the Philippines, was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Court Judge Timothy Burgess in Anchorage. The court also ordered her to pay restitution for the total amount stolen and serve five years of supervised release.

Assistant U. S. Attorney Aunnie Steward, who prosecuted the case, said Robinson stole $300,000 by falsifying bank paperwork over a period of four years. According to filings made by prosecutors, they also say that Robinson bullied, cajoled, and manipulated her fellow Filipino employees into not verifying vault balances and to cut tape from the bank’s security cameras. She used the $300,000 for a new house in the Phillipines and designer brand goods.

Ultimately, Robinson was fired in 2006 for fraudulently opening up customer accounts to get credit for new accounts opened. The following day she withdrew $150,000 from her personal account and fled to the Phillipines.

The new incoming assistant branch manager did an audit, discovered the thefts, and fired the head teller under Robinson for not properly verifying vault balances.

Robinson was extradited in June of this year and pled guilty to the charges.

A Juneau man will spend more time in prison after firing a shot at a downtown apartment building last May and then barricading himself in a separate house nearby.

Jeffrey Allen Isturis, 52, was sentenced on Monday in Juneau Superior Court.

The sentence includes five-years in prison with three-years suspended for a weapons misconduct charge, three-months for violating a domestic violence restraining order, plus over eleven-months of previously-suspended time now imposed. That comes to a total of about three-years and two-months in prison. The sentence also includes five-years on probation.

Two other charges of assault were dismissed as part of a plea agreement with prosecutors. Isturis pled guilty to the remaining charges in August.

Isturis said he was nervous and claimed that he did not understand why the sentence seemed to be so harsh. But Superior Court Judge Philip Pallenberg said he had a different way of looking at it, especially considering the serious nature of the crime and Isturis’ prior criminal history.

“In my mind, the issue is whether the sentence that was agreed to is too lenient or not,” said Judge Pallenberg.

Pallenberg suggested that – if he had the leeway — would’ve imposed more time in prison, especially if Isturis was convicted during a jury trial and went through open sentencing. But Pallenberg said the sentence was not unreasonable when compared to what other judges might independently hand down for a similiar crime.

“I think that this is a very favorable resolution for him,” said Assistant District Attorney Amy Williams.

Williams says Isturis has twenty-six prior convictions going back almost thirty years, ten of those convictions were just for assault. Isturis was already on probation for two other assaults when the May incident occurred.

“If Mr. Isturis is concerned that this sentence is too harsh, then his concerns are terribly misguided considering the seriousness of the offense,” said Williams.

The incident at the Fosbee Apartments near the Governor’s Mansion last May happened just hours after a woman had a domestic violence protective order served against him. After shooting at the woman’s door, Isturis fled and spent over five hours in the garage of a house a few blocks away near West 11th and ‘C’ Streets until surrendering to Juneau Police. Officers had cordoned off the area until the stand-off was resolved.

Isturis sat through part of the sentencing hearing with elbows on the table and head against his cuffed hands. He appeared to be trembling during part of the proceeding, and he reached for a tissue when he broke down as he issued his own comments later. Isturis apologized to the community, his parents, the court, and police. He essentially admitted that alcohol was at the root of all of his problems and he said he needed to get sober for himself.

“I hurt my kids really bad,” said Isturis. “I (also) hurt someone that I really cared about. We were in love with each other.”

“We both knew that — when we both drank — we’d get into an argument and that it’d be about the past,” said Isturis.

As part of his sentence, Isturis must participate in addiction treatment, a batterers intervention program, and a mental health evaluation and any potential treatment.

Sentencing has been rescheduled for January 18 in the case of a former Juneau police officer charged with interfering with a witness.

Brian Ervin, 39, had initially been charged with three felony charges of sexual abuse of a minor. But those charges were dropped in August as Ervin pled “no contest” to the felony interference charge.

Ervin’s prison term of two years may be well above the presumptive minimum of a year because the crime occurred while he was out on release.

Juneau Police Department officials say they removed Ervin from normal police duties when the allegations initially surfaced. He had been reassigned to another position within the City and Borough of Juneau.

A special investigator who probed into misconduct by prosecutors in the case of the late Alaska Senator Ted Stevens says the government lawyers should not face criminal charges. Despite that, the investigator found widespread concealment of evidence that could have helped Stevens mount his defense.

Ted Stevens was the longest serving Republican in the Senate when he was convicted 3 years ago of failing to list on his Financial Disclosure Forms gifts he’d received. Prosecutors said they amounted to $250,000 and included items like house renovations and a massage chair. But accusations of misconduct by FBI agents and withholding of evidence by prosecutors soon surfaced, and when the Obama Administration came into power, Attorney General Eric Holder asked that the verdict be vacated.

The judge who oversaw the case, U.S. District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan, threw it out and ordered an independent investigator, D.C. attorney Henry Schuelke to look into what happened. After two and a half years of silence on the case, Judge Sullivan filed an order Monday saying that the investigation had results. It found the Stevens prosecution was “permeated” by “systematic concealment” of significant evidence which Stevens’ lawyers could have used to corroborate the Senator’s story and testimony. It also could have seriously damaged the testimony and credibility of the government’s key witness, former Veco executive Bill Allen.

Schuelke found that at least some of the concealment by the government was “willful and intentional.” Despite that, he is not claiming that the prosecutors committed criminal violations.
Schuelke says that’s because Judge Sullivan did not issue a “clear and unequivocal” order directing the prosecutors to follow the law. When during the trial prosecutors admitted holding back evidence, Judge Sullivan admonished them and said, “we all know what the law is” and that they in good faith knew they had to provide relevant information to the defense. But Schuelke says that wasn’t a clear direction.

Judge Sullivan, for his part, says the prosecutorial misconduct was to a degree he hadn’t seen in 25 years on the bench.

The independent investigator Henry Schuelke and a colleague, William Shields, came to their conclusions after reviewing more than 150,000 pages of documents and interviewing witnesses, holding depositions, and familiarizing themselves with two Alaska cases against former state legislators Pete Kott and Vic Kohring.

The massive report by Schuelke and Shields is 500 pages, and sealed from the public eye until the Justice Department and the six attorneys under question can review it and decide if they want to challenge making it public. And DOJ and the lawyers may indeed fight that.

This isn’t the only investigation into the Stevens case. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility is conducting its own look into what went wrong and who’s responsible. Earlier this month Attorney General Holder told a Senate panel that that multi-hundred page report will be coming out soon, but it’s unclear whether that report will see the light of day and be made public.
Ted Stevens lost his bid for reelection one week after being convicted in 2008… he died in a plane crash near Dillingham last year. Last week would have marked his 88th birthday.

Two people and their dog were rescued by the Coast Guard on Sunday in Auke Bay.

The group were in an 18-foot skiff that ran aground on Coghlan Island and then called a friend by phone.

The Coast Guard then dispatched a 25-foot response boat which arrived on scene, picked up the unidentified dog and two people, and transported them back to Auke Bay harbor area.

No injuries were reported.

A former U.S. Senate fisheries expert – who falsely reported his own catch – will now be sentenced in February.

Arne Fuglvog’s sentencing in U.S. District Court was previously scheduled for Friday, November 18. Judge H. Russell Holland on Thursday approved the latest delay, proposed earlier in the week by Fuglvog’s attorney Jeffrey Feldman.

The hearing scheduled for Friday had already been postponed to December 7 because Feldman had a scheduling conflict this week with clients in another case out-of-state. The latest continuance moves it to February 7, according to electronic federal court records.

Fuglvog pled guilty in August to one count of violating the federal Lacey Act for falsifying catch records of sablefish intended for interstate commerce.

The Petersburg fisherman had worked as a fisheries aide for U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski from 2006 until July of this year. He resigned the day before the charges became public and details of a plea agreement were released.

Fuglvog broke the commercial fishing laws before he took the Senate job.

Under his plea agreement, he is to be sentenced to ten months in prison and a $50,000 fine. He also will be required to give $100,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The non-profit was created by Congress in 1984 and directs public conservation funds to preservation and restoration projects for wildlife species and habitats.