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’s Supreme Court has placed new limits on how long criminal cases can be postponed, part of an effort to reduce the time many criminal defendants wait to face trial in the state.
The court’s order, which takes effect May 12, directs state judges to allow no more than 270 days of new delays for criminal cases filed in 2022 or before. Court system data shows that about 800 active cases fall into that category, making each one more than 800 days old and counting.
The move to reduce delays follows an investigation by ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News that found some cases have taken as long as a decade to reach juries, potentially violating the rights of victims and defendants alike.
The time to resolve Alaska’s most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade. Victims rights advocates had long complained that judges rubber-stamped delays, particularly in Anchorage, where about half of the cases impacted by the Supreme Court order are pending. Some cases dragged on so long that victims or witnesses had died in the meantime.
In addition to capping the duration of delays, the state Supreme Court’s order says judges must explain why they’ve allowed any request for delay.
“It’s a positive step by the court to be able to work with the lawyers to move cases along,” said state Sen. Matt Claman, D-Anchorage, chair of the Judiciary Committee, which held a hearing on pretrial delays in February.
Alaska Court System spokesperson Rebecca Koford said the new Supreme Court order, issued on March 12, tackles the “most pressing concern.”
The time needed to close out the oldest cases “is exceedingly long,” she said, “and we need to get them resolved.”
The Supreme Court order said judges in pre-2023 cases are to allow only 90 days of new delays at the request of the defense, 90 days for prosecutors and 90 days for “other periods of delay for good cause.”
Koford said that an example of why a case might be delayed for good cause would be when a witness is temporarily unavailable to testify. Additional efforts are in the works to reduce the time it takes cases to get to trial, she said.
“We do not view it as the solution; it is part of the solution,” Koford said.
Alaska criminal rules grant defendants the right to a trial within 120 days of being charged with a crime. Crime victims have the right to the “timely disposition” of their case under the state constitution.
The 120-day deadline is rarely met. One sexual assault case highlighted by the Daily News and ProPublica was filed in 2014 and has been delayed more than 70 times. That case has now been set for trial on April 1.
Several high-ranking state officials have spoken of the need to rein in delays since the news organizations highlighted the issue in January.
Chief Justice Susan M. Carney told state lawmakers on Feb. 12 that the court system was working to curb delays, noting recent news coverage of the issue. The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing focused on pretrial delays later that month, when court system General Counsel Nancy Meade told legislators that the cases recently highlighted in news stories were unacceptable but were outliers among criminal cases.
“The time it takes to resolve cases now is certainly longer than it was 20 years ago. Nobody is happy about that,” Meade testified.
The new order signed by Carney and other Alaska Supreme Court justices said that a 2023 judicial order had led to “some decrease” in what the court characterized as “persistent backlogs.” The current order, the court said, “is intended to facilitate the further reduction in the time to disposition of these older criminal cases without undue delay.”
The order also addresses delays caused when attorneys fail to provide evidence to the opposing party in a timely manner. It says that judges should consider sanctions, including dismissing the charges, when prosecutors fail to provide evidence or banning the missing evidence from being used at trial.
