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The evidence was overwhelming from the time it all began in 2017. A sexual assault in broad daylight at a popular Anchorage park, with a witness who dialed 911 and described the attack as it was happening. A police officer hoisting the suspect from atop one of the victims, the suspect’s pants still around his knees. DNA evidence corroborating the crime.
Yet in Alaska’s slow-motion court system, it took more than seven years for the case against Fred Tom Hurley III to finally go to trial, in December. Attorneys came and went with the passage of time — a series of six for the defense and four for the prosecution — as judges granted 50 delays. Most of the slowdowns came at the request of Hurley’s lawyers, long before and long after the COVID-19 pandemic paused jury trials across the state. At hearing after hearing, talks concerned scheduling, not the facts of the case.
For the two women Hurley was charged with assaulting, justice delayed meant justice denied in their lifetimes. Both died before the case ever reached the jury.
Told the details of the case, former Florida state prosecutor Melba Pearson called it “a travesty of justice.”
“That’s a travesty. Period. End of story,” said Pearson, who recently co-authored a report on trial delays across the country.
What’s surprising isn’t how long the Hurley case lingered unresolved, but how ordinary it is in Alaska’s court system.
A recent Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica investigation found hundreds of misdemeanor criminal cases in Anchorage thrown out of court because overwhelmed city prosecutors couldn’t meet speedy trial deadlines.
But when it comes to felonies in Anchorage and across the state, the opposite problem often exists for victims and witnesses: a wait of five, seven or even 10 years or more to reach trial, plea agreement or dismissal, often because of defense motions to delay. As a benchmark, the National Center for State Courts says 98% of felonies should be resolved in under a year.
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The extreme pretrial delays in Alaska are especially striking because it has one of the nation’s strictest limits on how long cases can drag out: 120 days from the time a person is charged.
In reality, this deadline is rarely met. Over a recent 12-month period, only seven criminal cases went to trial within 120 days in Alaska state courts.
The problem is getting worse. The median time to resolve the most serious felony cases, such as murder and sexual assault, has nearly tripled over the past decade, from just over a year in 2013 to 1,160 days in 2023. About 54% of people held in Alaska jails and prisons last year were there to await trial or, in a smaller number of cases, to await sentencing. That’s up from just 30% in 2016.
A courts spokesperson, Rebecca Koford, said by email that the state “is well aware of the issues with case backlogs and has been actively working to improve time to disposition.” Koford cited an Anchorage presiding judge’s orders limiting when postponements may be used, as well as new training for judges on managing case flows.
“We have made inroads in that direction,” she said, “but it takes time and continues to be exacerbated by the low number of attorneys who are able to handle complex criminal cases."
Some defense attorneys request pretrial delays to cope with overwhelming caseloads. According to the Alaska court system, Hurley’s current attorney, Rex Butler, represents defendants in at least 375 active cases, for example. (In an interview, the attorney said he sometimes hires other lawyers to help with that workload and noted that most cases do not require a jury trial.)
Time is generally a friend to a defendant. Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.
—Assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan in an email to a client
Attorneys also can employ delays as a tactic, increasing the odds their clients will walk free as the prosecution’s case ages. Defendants sit in jail or live on monitored release pending trial, but the wait can avert a heftier prison sentence.
The thought was captured in a 2017 email from a state-appointed defense attorney to his client, later made public in a court proceeding.
“Time is generally a friend to a defendant,” assistant public advocate Jim Corrigan wrote. “Witnesses may get into trouble or their recollections may fade, which could work to your benefit.”
The defendant had been questioning why his lawyer asked to delay his sexual assault case.
“You should not be in any hurry to take these cases to trial,” Corrigan replied.
Corrigan did not respond to a recent request for comment.
Terrence Haas, a former judge who oversees public defenders in Alaska, said that any lawyer who believes a delay is necessary or would benefit a client’s case is “bound by the ethics of their profession and duty of loyalty to their client to request a continuance.”
But one person has the power to say no to such requests: the judge. Records show Alaska judges routinely agree to such requests even after years of delays. These preventable failures have existed for more than a decade. What’s more, everyone saw it coming.
Repeated Warnings Victims advocates in Alaska have raised alarms about pretrial delays over and over again, largely without impact.
“It is not unusual for felony cases to take 2 to 3 years before victims see their case go to trial or result in a plea agreement,” the Alaska Office of Victims’ Rights wrote in 2014. Few judges were giving serious consideration to victims who asked them to speed up the process.
The agency issued similar warnings as the years went by:
2015 : Judges often allowed 20 or more status meetings before forcing the two sides to go to trial.
2016 : The most common victim complaint is “pre-trial delays allowed by the courts.”
2017 : The maxim that “justice delayed is justice denied” could not be more true than for victims of crime in Alaska. “Victims cannot heal or find closure when the wounds caused by the offender are constantly reopened by a prolonged court case. Victims are often held hostage to the system for far too long and in violation of their rights as victims.”The victims’ rights office laid blame for the delays mostly with judges, particularly judges in Anchorage.
One week in 2018, the agency watched four Anchorage Superior Court judges hold pretrial hearings for 181 criminal cases. The judges let 161 be delayed up to two months. In most cases, the victims’ rights office said, neither the defense attorney nor the prosecutor gave a good reason for the delay. Not once did a judge ask what the victim wanted, the report said.
The next year, the Office of Victims’ Rights accused Anchorage judges of being enablers. “It is up to the judge to control the docket, to adhere to standing court orders, to follow the law and to protect victims’ rights as well as defendants’ rights,” the agency wrote. “Generally, what is seen is more of a rubber stamping of such requests.”
A common delay tactic during the pandemic known as the “off-record continuance” allowed attorneys to delay cases by email and skip court. But it persisted after courts reopened. Records show judges in 2024 allowed off-record continuances in dozens of cases, ranging from a 4-year-old felony assault to a 5-year-old sexual assault to a 6-year-old car theft.
(The Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica delivered questions to all Anchorage Superior Court judges by email and in hard copy, receiving a response from only two judges, who both said they mostly hear civil cases and rarely preside over criminal trials.)
Crime survivors pay a price for the inaction. They take time off work or pay for day care to attend hearings, advocates note. Victims fight to calm the pit in their stomachs before stepping into a courtroom, only to find the event is canceled.
The Office of Victims’ Rights in May filed paperwork on behalf of the alleged victim in a 2017 sexual abuse case, demanding the court honor the woman’s right to “timely disposition” under the Alaska Constitution. The agency asked Superior Court Judge Jack McKenna to hold a trial in June so that the woman and her family could move on with their lives. The judge delayed the case once again.
McKenna did not respond to an email or questions delivered to his courthouse mailbox. But Koford, the court spokesperson, said the trial in the 2017 case had to be delayed because the defense attorney was scheduled to appear in another trial. Other delays were because the prosecutor was unavailable.
The state of Alaska’s criminal justice system is operating on the fringes, barely able to protect against the deprivation of fundamental rights, barely able to respond in a professionally responsible manner.
—Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald
Koford said the case illustrated Alaska’s shortage of experienced attorneys to handle major felonies, which often leaves judges with a choice between postponing a trial and forcing one with unprepared attorneys, unavailable witnesses or an incomplete examination of evidence.
“A victim’s right to a speedy trial is important,” Koford said, “but it is also important to try a case correctly the first time.”
One judge has publicly blamed backups on lawmakers and governors, whom he accused of skimping on money for public defenders.
Fairbanks Superior Court Judge Michael MacDonald was presiding over a case in 2019 involving the beating death of an Alaska Native woman in a Yukon River village. It was less than 2 years old and about to go before a jury. The defendant admitted to the killing.
Then the defendant’s state-appointed attorney requested a delay, saying she had been juggling 200 cases at once, felt burned out and couldn’t ethically move forward with a trial. (A 1998 audit for the Alaska Legislature said public defenders can “ethically” handle no more than 59 cases in a 60-hour workweek.)
MacDonald described the request as a sign of dysfunction.
“The state of Alaska’s criminal justice system is operating on the fringes,” MacDonald wrote, “barely able to protect against the deprivation of fundamental rights, barely able to respond in a professionally responsible manner” to violent crime.
He went ahead and ordered the trial postponed. The defendant eventually pleaded guilty to second-degree murder under an agreement with the prosecution. (The judge has since retired but declined to be interviewed for this story, saying he still occasionally fills in for other judges and presides over cases.)
Seven Years, No Trial At the December sexual assault trial for Hurley in Anchorage, few people were more eager to see the case concluded than Eva Foxglove. The 53-year-old mother was the one who called 911 during the attack. Foxglove didn’t know the women, but she said she had been sexually assaulted before and knew they might not be able or willing to testify when the time arrived.
“I have to come and do this for them,” she told the jury.
The events Foxglove watched unfold in 2017 had their origins shortly after Hurley’s release from jail on a previous sexual assault charge.
Accused of sexually assaulting a woman in her home, Hurley was acquitted at trial, walked out of jail and wrote on Facebook July 13, 2017, “What’s up free at last.” Two days later, he showed up at an Anchorage soup kitchen, where he met the two women he was later charged with attacking, according to a police report.
The report said the three of them walked to the Delaney Park Strip, several city blocks of grass that skirt a gleaming oil company tower and the governor’s office building. One alleged victim told police Hurley said she was beautiful and tried to kiss her but that she turned her head and told him she was engaged to be married, the report said.
The Delaney Park Strip is a popular park that covers several city blocks in the heart of Anchorage.
Credit:
Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News
Foxglove recalled in a recent interview that she was charging her phone at an outlet in the park. It was about 4 p.m. in the thick of tourist season, 68 degrees under a clear, bright sky.
The women seemed to pass out after drinking from a half-gallon bottle, Foxglove said. She could see Hurley moving on top of one and then the other, she said. “I was like, ‘What the fuck is he doing?’” Foxglove said. Shortly after she dialed 911, a police officer jogged up to Hurley and yanked him from one of the two women, the officer, now a sergeant, told jurors in December.
Police later collected DNA matching Hurley’s from the second woman’s body and from the first woman’s clothing.
The case was assigned to Anchorage Superior Court Judge Kevin Saxby and given a trial date of Oct. 9, 2017. But that date came and went. Saxby and other judges agreed to delay the trial 50 times, most often at the request of Hurley’s lawyers. One example: Hurley’s attorney wanted to see the criminal records of the two alleged victims.
Saxby did not respond to emailed and hand-delivered questions. Koford, the court system spokesperson, said judges generally do not comment on their actions for “fairness and due process reasons” and “cannot and do not comment on decision-making and reasoning in a case.”
One of the alleged victims was described in enough detail in police reports for the Daily News and ProPublica to track down additional information about her life. She lived unhoused and was listed in police reports as a victim in at least two prior sexual assault cases.
The woman told officers that she had passed out and awoke to find Hurley on top of her, police records say. A charging document quoted her using the word “rape” to describe what happened. Unlike the arriving police officer, the woman could testify not only to sexual contact, but also her lack of consent.
She never got the chance.
A passerby found her body outside a public library in Anchorage on April 19, 2019, some time between Hurley’s 19th pretrial delay and his 20th. Police said there was no evidence of a crime. At some other point during the long wait for Hurley’s trial, the second woman died as well.
Prosecutors had the DNA and witnesses who could establish sexual contact. But without the victims, prosecutors needed to show that they were incapacitated and therefore inherently incapable of agreeing to sex. The job fell largely to Foxglove. On the witness stand, she wore an oversized T-shirt and loose ponytail. “I’ve never been to court before,” she told the jury. But she recounted the events from seven years ago clearly, with greater precision and consistency than she’d offered in an earlier interview with a reporter.
Eva Foxglove testifies during Fred Tom Hurley III’s sexual assault trial at the Nesbett Courthouse in Anchorage in December.
Credit:
Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News
When Butler, Hurley’s defense attorney, challenged her statement that the two women were passed out — rather than simply asleep — she never flinched. She could tell when someone wasn’t just napping but dead-to-the-world unconscious, she told the jury.
“I was a drunk. I know what sleep is. When you want to sleep you lay down and go to sleep. But when you drink so much, you pass out,” she said. “I know the difference, and I see.”
Fred Tom Hurley III, left, talks with his attorney, Rex Butler, during his trial.
Credit:
Loren Holmes/Anchorage Daily News
After seven years of delays, Hurley’s attorney gave no opening statement and did not call any witnesses. The trial took five days, including two days of jury selection.
The jurors returned their decision within two hours on Dec. 10: guilty on five of six felony sexual assault charges. As of Monday, the state court website indicated Hurley has not filed an appeal.
In the Defendant’s Favor Although the Hurley case ended in a conviction, delays have worked to the defendants’ advantage in other Alaska criminal cases.
A man held at Fairbanks Correctional Center for two years without a trial had his drug charges thrown out after asserting his attorney waived his speedy trial rights violation without his consent.
And since October, at least 10 pretrial inmates at the Goose Creek Correctional Center have filed petitions in federal court challenging their state detention. They allege the state violated their speedy trial rights and in some cases appointed unreliable public defenders, saying they never signed forms saying they wanted to stop the 120-day countdown to a trial. Federal judges dismissed four of the petitions, while another six are awaiting a decision.
Haas, the official who supervises Alaska public defenders, said he wasn’t familiar with the petitions but said it’s not uncommon for defense attorneys and their clients to disagree about how long it will take to get ready for trial. “During the pandemic, of course, that got a little bit more extreme in terms of what delays were going on,” he said.
Pretrial delays can lead to a reversal for prosecutors even if they’ve won a conviction.
In a recent decision that could have far-reaching impact in Alaska, a man convicted of sexually abusing children succeeded in forcing the Superior Court to revisit his case.
Police arrested Ralph Hernandez in 2011 after an 11-year-old girl told her friend about the alleged abuse. Prosecutors said he abused, tortured or sexually assaulted children from toddlers to teenagers.
Over the seven years that it took the case to get to trial, Hernandez repeatedly voiced his demand for a speedy trial, often over the objections of his public defender. A jury convicted Hernandez of three counts of first-degree sexual abuse of a minor and one count of attempted second-degree sexual abuse of a minor.
But Alaska’s appeals court ruled in February that Hernandez had proven his pretrial delays were “presumptively prejudicial” and sent the case back to lower court for review.
In the 1978 federal ruling that set the precedent for the Hernandez case, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals made clear that states can’t get away with violating speedy trial rights simply by blaming a shortage of public defenders or prosecutors.
“A state government’s allocation of resources plays a major role in creating congested dockets, and it is unfair to require defendants to bear the entire burden that results from the government’s fiscal decisions,” the court wrote. “There must be a point at which delay due to a congested docket becomes so unacceptable that by itself it violates the right to a speedy trial.”
Although defendants may object to endless delays, they can benefit from them as time eats away at the prosecution’s case.
“We as prosecutors are obligated to present evidence in court and persuade a jury beyond a reasonable doubt about what happened,” said John Skidmore, Alaska deputy attorney general. “But when memories fade and people are less certain about what happened at some point in the past, that makes it more difficult for us to meet those burdens.”
Especially in cases of sexual violence, it’s prosecutors who are in a race against time. Often the evidence rests on a survivor’s word against an attacker’s. Losing the alleged victim’s testimony — a likelier outcome each day without a trial — can crush a prosecutor’s odds of a conviction.
It happened, a prosecutor said, in the case of Andre Corcoran.
“What She Deserved” The charges say Corcoran met his alleged victim, an unhoused woman taking cooking classes at a soup kitchen, shortly after moving to Alaska. The woman told police Corcoran seemed safe because he volunteered to clear kitchen tables. When Corcoran told her he had no place to stay, the woman offered to show him an abandoned tent.
Inside, according to the charging document, Corcoran and the woman began kissing, but she said she felt uncomfortable and asked him to stop. The charging document says Corcoran admitted to holding her down and attempting to have sex as she screamed for help. A police report on Corcoran’s arrest describes his subsequent interview with a detective.
“I think women need to be raped,” Corcoran told the detective, according to a transcript. The defendant said his only regret was not completing the act, the report said.
She wanted to make sure that he was held accountable for what he did and that he wouldn’t be able to do this again.
—Prosecutor Betsy Bull
A grand jury indicted Corcoran on Aug. 30, 2018, on felony sexual assault charges. He waited in jail as defense attorneys had the case delayed at least 11 times. Still, when it finally reached trial in late April, Corcoran’s alleged victim was willing to testify despite suffering anxiety, a prosecutor later said.
“She wanted to make sure that he was held accountable for what he did and that he wouldn’t be able to do this again,” prosecutor Betsy Bull told the court.
Then the judge declared a mistrial. Corcoran’s attorney said he wasn’t told the alleged victim had a boyfriend at the time the assault was reported — which the attorney said gave the woman a potential motive to lie and cover up consensual sex with another man.
The prosecution was ready to give it a second try this fall, but as the new trial date approached, Corcoran’s alleged victim died of severe burns after her tent caught fire.
Bull said she was forced to offer a deal that let Corcoran plead guilty to a single count of felony assault. He would be sentenced to time served — his years in jail awaiting trial — and would not have to register as a sex offender. The prosecutor told the judge it was the best she could do.
“It’s not, from the state’s perspective, because he didn’t do it,” Bull said.
The courtroom was empty. No jury. No spectators. The judge asked the defendant if he wanted to say anything, and Corcoran stood.
“I do feel bad about who I used to be,” he said. “And I have made changes to who I want to be. I want to be a better person.”
Corcoran’s attorney, Jaffer Khimani, said Corcoran’s expression of remorse “was sincere to me.” Khimani said he was unaware of something else that, according to a report filed by a police detective, his client imparted moments after.
The report said Corcoran spoke to the court officer who escorted him to an elevator on his way to being set free.
It quoted Corcoran saying something very different from what he’d told the judge about his actions: “She got what she deserved.”
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.
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.
