Vigilante justice and mob rule

John Skidmore, deputy attorney general in the criminal division, gave a legislative subcommittee what sounded like a reasoned argument to add $502,000 a year to the state budget to pay for investigative grand juries.

The Alaska Constitution mentions grand juries in Article 1, Section 8 in a sentence that says, “The power of grand juries to investigate and make recommendations concerning the public welfare or safety shall never be suspended.”

So adding an attorney, a paralegal and a law office assistant would allow the Department of Law to see to it that grand juries can investigate what needs investigating, Skidmore said.

But Skidmore was not telling the full story. He didn’t mention the thirst for vigilante justice and mob rule.

Skidmore did not explain the radical right-wing politics driving the campaign for investigative grand juries when he testified to the law department budget subcommittee February 16.

The mess created by Attorney General Tregarrick Taylor, Skidmore’s boss, with the runaway David Haeg grand jury is the strongest argument to kill this budget request.

We do need an investigation about why one man’s personal gripes against the legal system—heard many times in court and rejected every time—were deemed sufficient by Taylor to start an official proceeding. Part pandering and part cowardice, I suspect.

There is no chance the attorney general would approve that sort of grand jury investigation.

A Superior Court judge has ruled he will toss the perjury indictment against retired Judge Margaret Murphy, one of Haeg’s top targets, unless the state decides this week to appeal.

Haeg is promising courthouse protests and illegal sit-ins after hours if the case is stopped and there is no appeal. He also demands that “citizens in every city in which Grand Juries are convened in Alaska are allowed to appeal their concerns of corruption.”

For 20 years Haeg has been trying to portray his felony game convictions as evidence that others are corrupt, a word he repeats endlessly to try to elevate his personal vendetta into something more substantial.

The word corrupt in Haeg’s circle means whatever the speaker or the listener imagines it to mean. This makes it easy to get a group together to oppose corruption.

Haeg is president of his corruption-fighting group, the Alaska Grand Jurors’ Association.

He has refused to take responsibility for his crimes. In his harangues, everyone is corrupt, including his attorneys, judges, Troopers, and prosecutors. He has claimed many times that Skidmore is among the corrupt.

Haeg excels at badgering right-wing politicians.

He succeeded beyond belief with Rep. Ben Carpenter and the attorney general, who reacted to the protests Haeg organized outside the Kenai courthouse for months.

Carpenter lobbied the attorney general to open the Haeg grand jury and Taylor went along with it.

On April 14, 2022, Carpenter wrote to Haeg to say, “I expect that a grand jury will be convened by mid-May to consider your case.”

Carpenter had met with Taylor and the attorney general told him that he had created barriers in the office to prevent conflicts of interest, making sure that Skidmore was excluded.

“John Skidmore was not allowed to be party to our conversation, for example,” Carpenter told Haeg about his talk with Taylor.

Carpenter said he knew that Haeg had “many reasons to distrust the process and the players . . .”

Haeg said his group was about to start a “statewide courthouse sit-in, to continue even after closing time and arrests,” when he got the news from Carpenter and Taylor in July 2022 that the grand jury was a go.

“Just a day before the planned sit-in, Representative Ben Carpenter and the Alaska Department of Law informed AGJA (Haeg’s group) that a special Grand Jury in Kenai had been convened, whose sole duty was to investigate and address judicial corruption,” says the form letter Haeg is trying to get members of his group to send to the contract prosecutor, requesting a new indictment of Murphy.

Skidmore, as I said earlier, told legislators that the investigative grand jury budget request does not reflect any political point of view. In truth, it reflects the attorney general’s point of view.

Skidmore said, “We found in the last three or five years is that there has been an increased demand for investigative grand juries from around the state. We’ve attempted to handle those within the Department of Law, specifically within the criminal division. The challenges in those cases? They have you start looking at the law, first of all on grand juries, but then the law and the topic of what the investigative grand jury should be about.”

“Let me give you an example. We’ve had to do two investigative grand juries thus far related to child in need of aid,” said Skidmore.

“Those are not areas that prosecutors are familiar with. So they then have to take the time to read through the Constitution, the statutes, the regulations, the court rules. They have to learn the practice and the policy that impacts those types of investigations. And then for each individual case they look at, they’ve got to figure out the facts or the evidence.”

“The amount of effort that it takes to do those sorts of things has been simply overwhelming. It has pulled our folks, prosecutors that work for me, away from prosecuting cases. We cannot afford to do that,” he said.

“Simultaneously I don’t want to deny any citizen the ability to go and seek an investigative grand jury where appropriate,” he said.

The key words are “where appropriate.” Someone has to decide.

And the Murphy perjury case brought by the Haeg grand jury?

Skidmore said:

“I can’t comment on the specifics of it, it’s actually contracted out to a special prosecutor and I don’t have any involvement or knowledge of really what’s going on there. And I haven’t read the case itself, so I can’t comment on that.”

“While I don’t know a lot about that other case, I can tell you what’s apparently obvious is, grand jurors heard information over an extended period of time, had some concerns, took an action. There is now legal wrangling, litigation, over whether what happened was appropriate or not appropriate. I understand all of that. That all requires work. Regardless of what side you’re on, regardless of whether you like it or not, it requires work. And that needs to be funded.”

“What is clear is that in the Constitution, the investigative grand jury function is not supposed to ever be suspended. And there are additional requests for investigative grand juries. How that’s to be managed, whether or not grand juries want to investigate, what those investigations look like is not a commentary by the Department of Law or the administration on any of the topics or the policies that are being investigated,” he said.

“It rather is saying, OK, there are some folks that think there’s something wrong. We can have a group of grand jurors look at it and the grand jurors decide if this is something that should be investigated and is this something that should happen,” he said.

There will never be a shortage of folks who think that something’s wrong. The attorney general has a duty to perform in this process, but Taylor opted for the innocent bystander routine with Haeg’s complaints because of politics.

Murphy’s attorneys said that while the attorney general’s office had concluded there were no grounds for an investigation based on Haeg’s claims, the prosecutor told the grand jury that it could do what it wanted to do. This was the hands-off approach that Taylor had promised to Carpenter.

“No longer are prosecuting attorneys to behave as gatekeepers for what grand juries may investigate,” Carpenter wrote.

The grand jury reconvened on July 21, 2022, with the prosecutor saying she would not be making a presentation on what to do about Haeg’s claims.

If the grand jury wanted “to be completely in the driver’s seat, that’s something you would all be able to do,” she said.

On August 2, 2022, the grand jury met to hear from Haeg, who went through a long list of unsupported accusations about corruption throughout state government.

He said the Alaska Court of Appeals judges are corrupt, as well as the members of the Alaska Supreme Court, and that corruption is rampant in the executive branch. In short, anyone who does not give him what he wants is corrupt.

He claimed that many attorneys in the attorney general’s office were corrupt and that “enormous pressure” would be placed on prosecutor Jenna Gruenstein to mislead the grand jury.

Haeg said the grand jury did not have to listen to Gruenstein and “he instead provided his own instruction on the law to be applied in grand jury proceedings. This presentation included vast amounts of irrelevant law from other states,” Murphy’s attorneys said.

Haeg said there would be no indictments, just a report, and he quoted Carpenter as confirming that “you folks can basically do whatever you want.” Haeg also said that the grand jury could indict.

Haeg said the grand jury should get its own attorney and replace Gruenstein.

After he was finished, the grand jury asked for an “investigator outside the system,” a request that Gruenstein said she would pass along.

Haeg’s website claims that Gruenstein was fired by the grand jury that day and later replaced by Clinton Campion under a state contract with the AG’s office. Campion was also not acceptable to Haeg.

Why? Campion had once fielded a baseless Haeg complaint against Marla Greenstein and found in 2012 that there was nothing that warranted an investigation.

Campion continued the hands-off policy from Taylor that sent the grand jury off the rails and led to the unwarranted perjury indictment that a judge has now rejected.

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